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Monday, Jun 16, 2008
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Information theory made simple

Anand Parthasarathy

Kerala techie puts desi spin on Grimms’ fairy tale to explain it to the young

Bangalore: Next month marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of the paper that laid the foundations of the way all electronic computers perform calculations.

In July 1948, Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, wrote an article in the Bell Systems Technical Journal: “A Mathematical theory of communication.” It drew on the 19th century-work of George Boole (after whom Boolean algebra is named) and suggested that all computations can be reduced to ones and zeroes — and if these were achieved by switches in an electrical circuit, a digital computer could be built.

Every subsequent computer has run on this principle, which has been expanded to form what is known as the Information Theory.

Kerala-based information scientist Achuthsankar S.Nair has hit on the novel method of a fairy tale to cloak the underlying mathematical principles. Dr. Nair, currently honorary Director of the Kerala University’s Centre for BioInformatics, has written a children’s story in Malayalam "Idichakkaplamoodile Rajakumari Thantram Padichethengane?” (How did the Princess of Idichakkaplamoodu master her technique?).

The story is a free adaptation of the well-known Grimms’ Fairy Tale “Rumpelstiltskin.” As in the original, a princess is forced to seek the help of an ugly goblin or dwarf to spin straw into gold, to save her own skin. When the time comes to pay his price, she has to guess his name — or hand over her baby.

In the original tale, she is just lucky to stumble on the name. But in Dr. Nair’s Indianised version, this becomes a test for which she has to apply the principles enunciated by Shanon: reduce the dimension of the problem by binary logic — that is divide the problem into two, again and again, to reduce the challenge.

She has to arrive at a solution by a process of elimination that involves just two answers or states: yes to no. This leads her to the name Rumpelstiltskin — and for young readers in Malayalam, the process is the first step to mastering the binary logic basic to all digital computation.

The profusely-illustrated book is priced at Rs.30.

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