Claude Shannon

American mathematician and engineer who created information theoryinformation theory, n.: A branch of mathematics that treats information as surprise — the less predictable a message, the more it tells you — and works out how far data can be compressed and how reliably it can be sent. in 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' (1948), written at Bell Telephone Laboratories. That paper defined information entropyentropy, n.: A measure of unpredictability. A fair coin toss has more entropy than a rigged one; an AI that is unsure of its next word has high entropy. and channel capacity and popularized the bit; its random approximations of English, built letter by letter and word by word from observed frequencies, were early n-gram modelsn-gram model, n.: An early type of language model that predicts the next word from just the few words before it, using counts of how often each word followed those words in a large collection of text., and in 1951 he estimated the entropy of English by having people guess the next letter of a text. Earlier, his 1937 MIT master's thesis had shown that Boolean algebra could describe and simplify relay switching circuits, a basis of digital design. His 1950 paper on programming a computer to play chess set out minimaxminimax, n.: A way for a game-playing program to choose moves by assuming the opponent will always make their best reply, and picking the move whose worst-case outcome is best. search with an evaluation function, the template for game programs for decades, and his maze-learning mechanical mouse Theseus (1950) was an early learning machine. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth workshopDartmouth workshop, prop. n.: A summer meeting of scientists at Dartmouth College in 1956, planned in a 1955 funding proposal that first used the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. Most histories treat it as the moment AI became a research field of its own. and moved that year to MIT, where he later became a professor. Kyoto Prize 1985.