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In this video I'm going to show you how to compute Shannon information content.
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First let's look at the analogy betweeen Boltzmann entropy and Shannon information.
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Shannon got his idea for characterizing information from the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann.
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So, recall that we defined the notion of a "microstate" as some detailed configuration of the system components---
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so, in the example of the slot machine, that would be one configuration of the slot machine windows, such as
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"apple, pear, cherry"---and a "macrostate" was some collection or set of microstates, such as
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"all three the same" or, "exactly one apple", and the entropy, S, assumes that all microstates are equally probable
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and here was the equation, engraved on Boltzmann's tomb, that says that the entropy of a particular macrostate
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was equal to k, Boltzmann's constant, times the log of W. Here this log---"l-o-g"---he used this to mean
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the natural log, and W was the number of microstates corresponding to this macrostate.
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K just gave us a way of assigning units, measured often in Joules per Kelvin, but for our purposes that
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k is equal to 1---let's just assume that---people actually do that to compute entropy sometimes,
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and it just gives us the entropy in different units, but we can use it to compare entropies.
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So, for example, let's look back at our slot machine.
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Remember our quiz, where we asked you how many microstates give rise to the "win" macrostate,
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"all three the same", and that was 5, and how many microstates give rise to the "lose" macrostate,
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and that was 120, so according to Boltzmann, if we assume that k, the Boltzmann constant, is 1, then
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we get S of this macrostate, let's call this S of the win macrostate, is equal to the natural
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log of 5, which is about 1.61, and the S of lose is equal to the natural log of 120, which is about 4.79---
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and the reason Boltzmann used the natural log here was to get this in a certain range of numbers,
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so usually we're talking about systems with a huge number of microstates that give rise to particular macrostates,
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and the natural log was the way of scaling those very large numbers.
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But you don't have to worry about the details of that, but you can see that the information---I'm sorry,
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the Boltzmann entropy of this macrostate is much smaller than the Boltzmann entropy
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of this macrostate, which was our intuition.
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Now, returning to our analogy, the Shannon information version of a microstate is a message---
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a symbol, number, or word---and the Shannon information version of a macrostate was a message source,
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which is a collection or set of possible messages, with some probability for sending each possible message.
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Now, just as we did for Boltzmann entropy, we're going to assume here that all the messages are equally probable,
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with M being the number of messages.
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Now, we can define H, the Shannon information content of a message source,
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as being equal to the log base 2 M, that is, the log base 2 of the number of messages.
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The log base 2 allows us to measure the information content in bits-per-message.
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Here's our example of our 1-year-old, who only says "da da da da", so there's only one message here,
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and our Shannon information content is equal to the log, base 2, of 1.
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Well, 2 raised to the 0th power is 1, so the information content is 0, which went with our intuition---
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there's no unpredictability, there's no surprise. Now,
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suppose now that instead of "da da da", our baby said "da ba ma", that is three messages,
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so if that were the case, then M would be equal to 3, and H would be equal to log base 2 of 3, which,
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according to my calculator, is 1.58. So, that gives us quite a bit more information content than
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when there's only one message.
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Our example with a fair coin, heads or tails, there's two messages,
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so H of a fair coin is equal to the log base 2 of 2, which equals 1,
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so the information content here is 1, which is always the information content
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if we have two choices, heads or tails, 0 or 1, with equal probability.
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One more example of this kind, the information content of a fair die is equal to, well here
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M equals 6---there's 6 possible messages, one for each side of the die,
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so it's equal to the log, base 2, of 6, which is approximately equal to 2.58, and that's in bits.
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So I'll tell you a little bit more, later on, what exactly this represents, in terms of
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coding or computer memory, but for now it goes along with our intuition that this has the highest information content
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so far that we've seen because there's 6 different messages.
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Well now I'm gonna write down a more general formula.
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For the previous formula, we were assuming that all messages have equal probability,
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but most often that's not the case, there's different messages with different probabilities---
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we have a biased coin, or, more realistically, we have a person who's talking and the words that
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come out of their mouth are not going to be equally probable.
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A more general formula---and this is the formula that Shannon actually wrote down---says,
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let M be the number of possible messages, and we're going to assign a probability
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to each message. So we'll call the probability of message i, that's one of the M messages,
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p, sub i---this is just a name for a probability given to message i---and Shannon's
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formula said the probability of this message source---well, this is a summation symbol,
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this says we're going to sum up all of the different---for each message i, all the way up to the total
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number of messages, this log-2 of the probability, times the probability. So this is like taking a weighted average,
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weighted by probability, and we put a minus sign out here because these probabilities are all fractions,
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and the log of a fraction is going to be negative, so we put the minus sign out here
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to counteract that negative, so you'll see that in a couple of examples.
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Now, if you don't understand this formula, just be patient, because I'll show you how it works in practice.
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Let's assume now that we have a biased coin,
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and that the probability of heads is no longer 1/2, but let's say that it's .6, and the probability of tails is .4.
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Ok, what is the information content of this?
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So, let's wright down our formula, H, the information content of the biased coin,
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is equal to minus the sum of the two components here, which is .6
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times log base 2 of .6, plus .4 times log base 2 of .4, which, on my calculator,
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approximately .971 bits. So this is lower information content than the fair coin,
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which had information content of 1 bit, and that's because, of course, this is more predictable---
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heads is more likely to come up than tails.
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Well now I can do something a little more general and look at an example of text information content.
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So suppose that I have a text, my question is what is the information content of this text?
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There's actually a number of ways to calculate that, and people do
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calculate the information content of text, as a measure of its complexity, for exampe, but
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the way that I'm going to do it is to look at the frequency of the different words
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as a measure of their probability. For each word, I'm going to write down the word,
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its frequency, and then, what I'm going to call its relative frequency.
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So let's see... the word "to" appears twice, "to be or not to be", but there's 6 words altogether,
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so I'm going to call its relative frequency 2/6, so out of the 6 words
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it appears twice. "Be" appears twice also, "or" appears once, "not" appears once...
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we'll make these relative frequencies their probabilities so we can say that the information content
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of this text is equal to minus, and now we're going to sum up for each message,
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that is, each word, its probability times the log base 2 of its probability,
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and we're going to do that for each word...
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and that's approximately equal to 1.9.
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So this is a way of calculating the information content of a piece of text---we'll see a little bit more
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on that in the exercises.