The Bit Player: A Documentary about Claude Shannon

The Bit Player is a 2019 documentary about Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. Like many other documentaries, this one intends more to misinform than to inform. The documentary was produced by Shannon’s intellectual heirs. The purpose is to deify the founder of the field so the heirs can be more influential and powerful.

Shannon’s greatest contribution is to define information mathematically as the entropy function. If the purpose of the documentary is to inform, it can present the history as a more continuous trend. In 1870s, Maxwell proposed the idea of Maxwell’s demon, in which he connects information to entropy. Since then, there are sporadic but persistent interest in the relation between entropy and information. If the purpose of the documentary is to inform, it would present these historical facts so Shannon’s idea is less a surprise. Instead, the documentary said nothing about them. This makes Shannon more like God.

Did Shannon himself know anything about the early discussion between information and entropy. According to his own writings and anecdotes, he apparently knew nothing about the early works. I always believe it. But after I watched the documentary, I start to have some doubts. In the documentary, Shannon even claimed his idea had nothing to do with his war time work in cryptography. It seems his idea has nothing to do with anything else. In the documentary, another person also said that Shannon revealed nothing about the origin of his idea. It comes from nowhere!

The documentary portrayed Shannon as a free spirit who cares little about the practical values of his ideas. Shannon may care little about the practical values. But he certainly cared deeply about his own respectability. When many people, many with less respectable pedigrees, attempted to apply his ideas to broader fields, he got alarmed. In 1956, Shannon wrote an editorial titled Bandwagon, warning against people making too much connection between information theory and other fields. That year, Shannon was 40 years old. Since then, he did little in his long remaining life.

Shannon was deeply aware his lack of achievement in his later life. In the documentary, he argued that most good mathematicians did their best works in their 20s and 30s. This is certainly true. But in Shannon’s case, probably in most other cases of prominent people as well, he and his disciples suppress many promising ideas.

Shannon is a great man. Like many other men, great and ungreat, he, and his disciples, try hard to further enhance his respectability. This explains a lot about the reluctance of himself and his disciples to expand his ideas to broader and less respectable fields, the suppression of others who attempt to expand his ideas to broader and uncertain territories.