On Information.

Humanity has progressed for the better in the past millennia due to its ability to effectively communicate and express information to other beings of their own species. From the simple cave paintings to the highly sophisticated laptops that we are typing in right now, we have greatly improved on our methods of storage of information, our characterization of information, and a greater understanding of information in general, which is why I'm writing this blog. 

I recently read the book The Information by James Gleick, the celebrated author of many books such as Chaos and Genius (a biography of Feynman). The book is an entertaining read, containing interesting anecdotes about so many people from so many fields who developed on communication and information. 

Information started just as a means of survival. Humans just wanted to know if other humans would help them get through the night without being preyed upon by wild animals. Then suddenly one person thought "Hey, that last hunt was really crazy, and I was able to get that huge bison without much help. Can I record it on the wall or something?". Hence began writing and the preservation of records. It took a lot more time for the development of a proper language and a script, but the elementary symbols were becoming stronger. The ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics, likely due to their somewhat isolated position in the African continent i.e, desert in the east, south and west, sea in the north. Their evolution of language is hence slightly different from the rest of the world. However, in the land of Mesopotamia (between the Euphrates and Tigris, roughly) and along the banks of the Indus, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there was a transfer of knowledge, hence they could have been knowing each other's languages. Samskrit and ancient Persian may have also developed within a few centuries of each other.

In Europe, the Greco-Roman civilizations were booming at the beginning of the first millennium. They used plenty of stone-carving to record their exploits and daily occurrences. It is around 3500-4000BCE that the Rigveda, one of the oldest surviving texts in the world was 'written'(for lack of a better word). The Rigveda is also special for being taught orally, for more than a millenium. It was around 800 years later that the Greeks started their writing and tablets. The Egyptians used papyrus, from which the modern term 'paper' is derived. 

But it is not only paper and speech that communicates information. In the book, there is a very interesting chapter about an ancient practice of communication in Africa along the banks of the river Niger, where tribes used drums to communicate. A certain pattern of the drums indicated a certain sentence or word. And it was not small, elementary sentences. There is this beautiful verse-like paragraph that was drummed (again, for lack of a better word) to just say - come back home: 

Make your feet come back the way they went,

make your legs come back the way they went.

plant your feet and your legs below,

in the village which belongs to us. 

The European researchers who learned of the actual meanings of the drums from the locals were astonished to see that such 'savages' were capable of great poetic capability. "Primitivity" is hence certainly not a defining factor for the structure of a language.

Anyway, moving forward greatly in time, we encounter the first documentation of information. We have heard of great libraries like that at Alexandria and Nalanda. When the library of Nalanda was burnt by the invader Bakhtiyar Khilji, there were apparently so many books that the library burnt for close to three full months. Yes, three months. That was how much information that was there at the time. Alexandria had close to 400,000 scrolls at the pinnacle of its glory. Nalanda had somewhere close to that number. Then, it was believed that the destruction of information was that which could truly wipe out traces of a civilization. 

In the late 15th century, people started to document words. It was certainly a painstaking process to sit and document all the words of a language, but it somehow happened. Only to find out at the end of the process that there were a few more words that needed adding, as depicted humorously in the BBC series Blackadder. 

In the mid 19th century, there came a new way to put together a lot of words. The Oxford English Dictionary today has more than 291,000 entries, having been revised many times since its conception. Print editions were printed for a long time, and the next edition of the OED will most likely be fully online.

Speaking of online, who doesn't like Wikipedia? Free information, all information, for all. The writers of the articles may be biased towards certain political angles, but it is information nonetheless. Wikipedia has made the world extremely convenient, and a joy for those who relish pure information. It has around 6.73 million articles, with around 4.3 billion words. And still, without photos or videos, all those articles occupy just about 21.2GB of data space, which you can appreciate a bit more when you realise that each character is 1 byte in size. So there are around 2.12 x 10¹¹ individual letters in the whole of the English Wikipedia database.

This brings us from one way of representing information, to another way. One that powers all our electronics, and enables me to write this to you all. 

What I'm typing now is read differently by a computer. It reads this as ones and zeros, because of the switching of transistors as a certain voltage is applied. The way that a computer reads information is a lot more simple than it seems. By flipping a bunch of transistors, it is possible to represent any of the letters in the English alphabet, as well the characters of many languages around the world. With the Unicode standard size  of a character being 2 bytes (16 bits), we can represent 2¹⁶ individual characters, which is probably enough to finish all the major alphabet systems in the world. For binary is the best language that this system can understand.

We progress forward to AI, which has, I think, made this writing obsolete by virtue of its extraordinarily large datasets and representational ability. But this piece was going to remain meaningless anyway, floating around in a gigantic web of frail, interconnected strands, expanding, breathing, and digesting any data thrown its way. Stuck somewhere in this beast will be my writing, with the digital hopes and dreams of people in the past, present, and the future.