Exhibit 5.1
1948Shannon measures prediction
Claude Shannon shows that text that resembles English can be generated by measuring which symbols or words tend to follow others.
Why it is in the museum
Language is treated as a prediction problem. From Shannon’s statistical sequences, the story leads to Transformers and large language models.
What supports this exhibit
Primary scientific paper
The mathematical foundations of information and experiments involving prediction and generation of language sequences.
Main source: Shannon, C. E. (1948), “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”.
What to keep in mind: Primary source.
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