Information Theory Used to Understand Whale Song
Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 | Justin Bugajski
A good article was recently published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that describes using Information Theory to understand the signals that whales use to communicate with each other.
The computer analysis and the human observers all found that whale songs are not only hierarchical, they convey around one bit of information per second. By comparison, humans generate 10 bits of information, or variance, for every word that is spoken.
This application is an intriguing mix of biology with mathematics sure to be used in more applications as scientists seek to better understand the complex patterns that shape the world around us.
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