“ABABABABABABABAB”. How much information was that? You may say “sixteen letters worth”, but is that the true answer? You could describe what you just read as “AB 8 times”, and save a bunch of characters, and yet have the same information. But what is information in the context of mathematics? The answer is nothing short of miraculous; information theory has applications in telephony, human language, and even physics. So what is information theory, and what can we learn from it?

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