Since the beginning, humankind has forever created and used various techniques to process, transmit and memorize information, a vast domain summed up by the term “information processing”. This concept is very different from that of intelligence, and the reader should take care not to confuse these two ideas. This is a conflation commonly witnessed today owing to the buzz around the idea of artificial intelligence, which often only covers Big Data processing. Misuse of this term has seen the concepts of “intelligence” and “processing power” come to be erroneously employed interchangeably.
Intelligence is a much more complex matter that is beyond the scope of this book, referring instead to adaptation and imagination capacity. Moreover, Einstein is credited with the maxim: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.”
Generally speaking, information processing can be broken down into several phases, set out in Figure 1.1.
Let us elaborate on this figure a little. One might say that for a piece of information (a sign, sound, color, etc.) existing in the real world, the first operation necessary before any processing is its acquisition through encoding.
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