#information-theory

#information-theory

Bell Labs, the once-famed research arm of AT&T, celebrated the centennial of its founding last year. In its heyday, starting in the 1940s, the lab created a cascade of inventions, including the transistor, information theory and an enduring computer software language. The labs' digital DNA is in our smartphones, social media and chatbot conversations. Every hour of your day has a bit of Bell Labs in it, observed Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory, a history of the storied research center.

The ordered state is a low-entropy state, and entropy measures the system's proximity to the most probable (equilibrium) state. Therefore, a system is "far from equilibrium" if its components are statistically correlated, because correlation among components is order. When parts are correlated rather than independent, you have structure.The system occupies a state that's improbable relative to chance. You can predict something about one part by knowing about another.

Anonymity is the end goal when studying privacy, and de-anonymization is likened to a guessing game where an adversary attempts to identify individuals from a set of candidates.