9 Questions on Information Theory
Thursday, February 13th, 2014 | Author: Konrad Voelkel
Back in 2010 I had a series of posts going about questions in information theory that arose from a 2-week seminar with a bunch of students coming from various scientific disciplines (a wonderful event!). Here I picked those that I still find particularly compelling:
- Is the mathematical definition of Kullback-Leibler distance the key to understand different kinds of information?
- Can we talk about the total information content of the universe?
- Is hypercomputation possible?
- Can we tell for a physical system whether it is a Turing machine?
- Given the fact that every system is continually measured, is the concept of a closed quantum system (with unitary time evolution) relevant for real physics?
- Can we create or measure truly random numbers in nature, and how would we recognize that?
- Would it make sense to adapt the notion of real numbers to a limited (but not fixed) amount of memory?
- Can causality be defined without reference to time?
- Should we re-define “life”, using information-theoretic terms?
What do you think?