TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Information Unit Nomenclature: Bits or Shannons?

3 pointsby sahalmost 17 years ago

1 comment

kurtosisalmost 17 years ago
I must have missed something basic here - is there some reason that "physical data storage capacity", and "information-theoretic information content", should have different units? Aren't they the same thing?<p>I guess a string of 2^32 '0's would take 4 gigs, but it's information content is much smaller. Is this what he means?<p>I have heard of people using natural logs instead of base-2 logs to compute the average entropy of a distribution in which case information is measured in "nats" instead of "bits".