Hacker Cinema
The Bit Player
2019 · Film · documentary · 85 min
Directed by Mark Levinson
The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius, Claude Shannon (the "Father of Information Theory"), who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.
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17 comments on Hacker News
"The Bit Player" (2018) film, "The Information" (Gleick) book,
"Who invented the transistor?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46449618 :
> Who invented the electric fence gate?
> How does the electric fence gate lead to transistors?
> [ Relay, Electric gate, Flip-flop (electronics) ]
/? find a specific transcript from "The Bit Player" and "Claude Shannon: The Father of the Information Age" IEEE Information Theory Society video where the narrator makes the leap from the Morse dots and dashes on fence wire to the math of entropy (and logarithms and channel coding and capacity limits)
Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their pursuits in both their academic and personal life.
[0] https://thebitplayer.com/
A nice value in this format (since it discusses books) would be to have a comment or portion of the description dedicated to listing the books (or ideally the media) discussed to a list.
I added "The Bit Player" (Claude Shannon documentary from 2018) to my watch list as well as "Recoding America," "Chip War," and "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" to my reading list.
I really enjoyed the The Bit Player (2018) about Claude Shannon, it uses an actor to play Shannon.
I thought More Than Robots (2022) seemed really cool too, about teams of teenagers building robots for a competition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsIo57pH-pA - is an interesting short documentary on the making of neon signs.
Birdmen: The Original Dream of Human Flight (2012) was pretty fascinating on the history of wingsuit flying
And also Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
I'd also highly recommend watching The Bit Player documentary. Not as info-dense as an article or paper, but it's a fun ride.
A film "The Bit Player" featuring "contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue from interviews with Shannon" was released in 2019. [0][1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7WmMSAxq8s
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bit-Player-John-Hutton/dp/B08D2N2MPH/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GHEMBJBE0V7F&keywords=the+bit+player&qid=1643199041&sprefix=the+bit+player%2Caps%2C64&sr=8-1
Claude Shannon had quite the mind.
"A Mind at Play" is a good book on Shannon's life and "The Bit Player" is a good partner movie to watch :)
"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" and "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" paved the way for much of modern computing.
Here's a very so-so promo site for The Bit Player. I saw it about a year ago (Curiosity Stream) and thought it was pretty decent. I somewhat sheepishly admit that, for a while, I thought that they had somehow interviewed the real Claude Shannon.
https://thebitplayer.com/
Although not devoted to Claude Shannon, Jim Al-Khalili's documentary "The Story of Information" does discuss Shannon's significant contributions and is how I first became aware of Claude Shannon.
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/story-information/
One key insight of Shannon's is that to study information as he did, you need to remove "meaning". You could measure the information content of anything and it doesn't matter what the symbols mean. Paradoxically, a random sequence of characters of the same length as this message would contain more information than this message that I am writing.
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The connection you draw to social media is cute, and I think it could help as an analogy in some cases. The Bit Player (2018 movie) makes a similar cute analogy to robust communication in marriage, that rather than saying the same message louder (yelling) or repeating the message (nagging), you should find many different ways to say the same message. And you could add an error-correcting code like "I love you".
I personally think it's a cute (not disparaging) way to think about communication among humans, but note that we still need to rely heavily on meaning, to decide what it even means to say the same message with different words.
What goes on with social media can be seen through lenses such as decision theory, and game theory, and graph theory, ..., and I think those fields have more to offer from the get-go than information theory. In any case, I personally would lean heavily on social science to try to get a better understanding of social situations, and to consider possible "interventions".
In particular, I do not think the kinds of communication errors that occur between humans are the same as e.g. bit flips. And to go back to the original point, it's tempting to conflate "information" (as in information theory) with "knowledge", or "understanding", or "truth".
There's a passable movie called "the bit player" currently on amazon and I guess elsewhere.
I'd never heard of him, and that's embarrassing, but he probably prefers it that way :-).
I recently watched a charming documentary on Shannon, called The Bit Player [0]. The film has some annoying flaws, but it really highlights how much Shannon was outside the box for a mathematician. He seems to have been extremely playful, and tinkering with hardware projects throughout his life.
How he even managed to make a (very limited) endgame chess computer [1] ~70 years ago still blows my mind.
[0] https://thebitplayer.com/
[1] https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-man-who-built-the-chess-machine
From Amazon Prime: "In 1948, Claude Shannon introduced the notion of a 'bit,' laying the foundation for the Information Age. His ideas power our modern life, influencing computing, genetics, neuroscience and AI. Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue from interviews with Shannon, 'The Bit Player' tells the story of an overlooked genius with unwavering curiosity."
https://thebitplayer.com/
Released in 2018; 85 minutes.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B08D291YQS/ref=atv_wl_hom_c_unkc_1_5
> you can figure out some of the details on why the movie was trash by googling my name.
For those interested: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2020/12/07/bit-player-desecrating-the-memory-of-claude-shannon/
Tl;DR: There are no substantive criticisms, but apparently the style wasn't to the reviewer's taste.
Here's an extract:
Finally there is the title. “Bit player?” Shannon is the most important applied mathematician and inventor of the late 20th and early 21st century. Nobody else comes close. What would they call a documentary on Maxwell? “Waves haggis-man?” What would their clever title for Newton be? “Calculus apple-noggin sperdo?” Napoleon’s documentary is “big hat frog midget.” How about calling your documentary of Freud “Pervert Schlomo” while you’re at it. What fucking pinhead planet are you from calling a documentary of Shannon “Bit player?” Die in a fire, you fucking philistines!
(Apparently the author missed that "Bit Player" is a play on the idea that Shannon played with bits, and is unfamiliar with the idea that association of a title with a common saying makes people more comfortable with the idea that'll enjoy watching it)
* https://thebitplayer.com
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bit_Player
* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5015534/
Available on Amazon Primer:
* https://www.amazon.com/Bit-Player-John-Hutton/dp/B08D291YQS
A good documentary about him was released last year too.
The Bit Player
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E3OldEtfBrE
I'd never heard of this documentary, so I took a look. I assume you meant "The Bit Player"? ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5015534/ ). It looks interesting, and it's on Amazon prime video so I'll give it a watch. Thanks!
I imagine the timing of this post is correlated with release of the documentary Bit Player about Claude Shannon. Haven't seen it yet but looking forward to it.
The article does a decent job at graphing and laying out some of the concepts of entropy for information theory, but I'm not sure who the target reader is, since prereqs are perhaps only slightly narrower than what one needs to read Shannon's paper[0] and the article is really illustrating only a fraction of the concept.
It can perhaps work as a primer for what shows up starting on pages 10-11 of the original document, in any case, provided you grasp the mathematical definition of entropy through thermodynamics, and the microstates-based definition through Boltzman, as well as "basic probabilities" (expected value, typical discrete distributions, terms like "i.i.d"), you should be good to go. But then you might already know all this..
And if you do, and you like what you read, then the full original thing by Shannon is a delight to explore to truly grasp what has been so foundational to a lot of things since 1948.
[0] http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf