Human Factors in Simple and Complex Systems, 3rd Edition

Appendix II: Information Theory

A methodological tool that played a key role in the rise of the human information-processing approach is information theory, developed by Claude Shannon (1948), which Gleick (2011) characterizes as one of the most important technological developments of the mid-20th century:

Shannon’s theory made a bridge between information and uncertainty; between information and entropy and between information and chaos. It led to compact discs and fax machines, computers, and cyberspace …  and all the world’s Silicon Alleys. Information processing was born, along with information storage and information retrieval.

Information theory was developed by communication engineers to quantify the flow of information through communication ...