Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you.

the information content of a code. A code is defined by its set of symbols and how frequently each is used. Shannon therefore defined the total information in a code as the sum of the information of all its symbols. Importantly, this sum is weighted – meaning the information from each symbol is multiplied by how frequently that symbol is used.

Or electrical engineer Claude Shannon, who launched the Information Age thanks to a philosophy course he took to fulfill a requirement at the University of Michigan. In it, he was exposed to the work of self-taught nineteenth-century English logician George Boole, who assigned a value of 1 to true statements and 0 to false statements and showed tha