Signals are information worth attending to. Noise is interference you ought to ignore. When I’m talking to you on the phone, the sound of your voice is the signal, while the static hiss of the line is the noise. Put like this, the challenge of seeking signals amid noise seems simple. Improving the quality of our conversation means preserving one while reducing the other.
Yet noise is subtler than this suggests. In his seminal 1948 paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, the mathem...
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