8  Elementary Units

8.1 Elementary unit of information & complexity

What is the starting complexity? What is the smallest, non-reducible unit of information?

• In AI it all still boils down to 1s and 0s.

  • The path from 1/0 to a chat bot is literally just a long chain of various math tools developed over thousands of years.

• The human brain.

  • The starting materiel is the base-pairing nucleotides of DNA. they generate complexity that, in turn, increases the information storage of both the input and output in a positive feedback loop that can be inherited (generations), and thus naturally selected (evolution), but they also has immediate consequences (individual life span).
  • This results in more complexity - a vastly larger range of combinations

• Quantum computing is d as n attempting increase the elementary complexity from binary to continuous.

• Research information theory?

  A key measure in information theory is entropy. Entropy quantifies the amount of uncertainty involved in the value of a random variable or the outcome of a random process. For example, identifying the outcome of a fair coin flip (with two equally likely outcomes) provides less information (lower entropy) than specifying the outcome from a roll of a die (with six equally likely outcomes).