Carrie Lyons said:
Sure it does: how long have you been living amongst us humans, KM?
Obviously a lot longer than you! Weighting information in terms of what
is considered important is the basis of lossy compression systems, an
imaging example of which is Jpeg. It is called "lossy" because
information is lost - even the Joint Photographic Experts Group do not
consider that this declassifies it from being information. You, on the
other hand, demonstrate absolute arrogance and with it a complete
inability to discriminate between "information" and "assumption"!
No, you're wrong. The new numbers (or say a new alphabet) might change
the relationships. The letters C and S and K might be reduced to two
symbols representing just the S and K sounds, freeing up a symbol to
represent something new.
That is irrelevant, merely taking advantage of the redundancy present in
one specific language. It does not change the total amount of
information that can be carried by combinations of those 26 letters or
numbers!
Same number of symbols, something new and more expressive though.
No - more efficient use of the information space available, just like
lossless compression of data.
Some encryption codes purposely do the reverse: they map the input
to fewer characters and when decrypted the message has occasional
misspellings, none of which are bad enough for a human to not be
able to understand the message.
Once again, this does NOT change the amount of information that any
combination of the letters can contain - it merely exploits the
inefficiency of one particular language. Since words such as QQRXYZ
simply do not exist in the language, the information space they
represent can be eliminated or utilised for another purpose. That does
not change the amount of information that can be represented by 26
letters or numbers.
Once again, I seriously suggest you read Claude Shannon's groundbreaking
paper on the topic. It may be over 50 years old but it specifically
addresses this very issue on the second page!
And no, Path/Message-ID/X-Trace etc are new (not in my original post),
meaningful and retained.
They are "wrappers" - just like envelopes and postage stamps and
franking marks on snail mail. Additional information wrapping the
original message for the purpose of delivery, and requiring additional
information to do so. The message *itself* remains unchanged and the
total amount of information contained by it does also.
What you said is false. If I opaquely overlay text over someone's
forehead, I've added information regardless of the byte count.
No - and by making such a ludicrous statement it is clear that you do
not understand what *information* actually is! You have removed
information from the original in order to place the text. In fact,
since the text you have added could have been implemented in less than
one byte per character and you have obliterated many bytes in the image
(each potentially containing unique information) to place the text, you
have actually reduced the total amount of information present. In
short, graphical text is an extremely inefficient means of encoding the
information contained by it.
More "signal." Our brains will assume "forehead" under the text.
Learn the difference between assumption and knowledge. You *assume*
that the perfect skin of a forehead is a continuance of what lies behind
the text, but you do not *know* that - the text could conceal an ugly
scar on the individual or even conceal text placed on the image by a
previous user, such as a watermark. Indeed, what is concealed by the
text may be the only discriminating feature of the individual which
identifies him from a twin brother, distant relative or anyone who
randomly has similar characteristics - you assume it doesn't, but you do
not know because you have lost the very piece of information that would
allow to know. What you assume is irrelevant in terms of the total
amount of information present in the image because the assumption can
be, and often is, wrong - and sometimes deliberately led to be wrong, as
they obviously were in intelligence information concerning Weapons of
Mass Distraction! Knowledge that you do not know what you are assuming
is just as significant as any other knowledge - but you are ignoring
that and treating your assumptions as knowledge.
Or if I secretly added a message in the low order bits but the
photo looked the same to the human eye. The original low order
bits conveyed almost no information, the new ones are a complete
new message. Not all bits are the same, information-wise, because
of the interaction with our brains.
Well at least you have acknowledge that you are removing information in
order to do so - but you have *NO* knowledge of what the importance of
that information is. You assume it is unimportant, but you do not know
that! I could, for example, wish to modify the image levels to improve
the visibility of shadow, mid range or highlight detail, in itself
sacrificing some information, in which case the loss of those lower bits
to your hidden message would be immediately obvious.
The relative importance of the information contained in the image, not
only to our brains but every stage of the imaging process is exactly
where we came into this discussion. Sharpening the image changes the
weighting of the information relating to fine detail, it does not,
however, change the total amount of information in the image.
To quote someone else:
"We know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are
some things that we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -
the ones we don't know that we don't know."
Your example of text on the forehead is making assumptions for those
"known unknowns" - you don't know what information the text conceals,
you assume. Your subsequent suggested example amounts to making
assumptions for the "unknown unknowns". Both have been established in
history as being erroneous assumptions!
To anyone who had not seen the original image, the entire new image
is all new information.
New information introduced at the expense of old information. ie. Total
information content is unchanged!
And if I change a smoking friend's face to all green and put
a word balloon on it saying "I need another cigarette then I'll
feel fine", I have (once again) added information.
At the expense of much more information than you introduce!
That you don't recognized changed bits as new information,
or even changed meanings to 26 symbols indicates you just
haven't lived among us humans for very long. ;-)
Changed bits is NEW information replacing OLD information - total
information content is UNCHANGED. It seems that you have lived amongst
the tricksters for far too long - unable to recognise that what is being
given by the right hand is also being taken away by the left. Which
particular minute were you born in, sucker?
WHOOOSH! If the detail can't be seen at twenty feet then defacto
the detail doesn't reach the eye and so ain't there.
And your point is what? The same detail reaches the eye from the large
image at long distance as the small image at short distance - NO CHANGE.
Same thing
for satellite photos...if you can't read the detail then the
image is lacking the detail. That a close enough look will see
the detail is irrelevant until you get such an image.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with your example! You started with a
certain information content, and modified it for different viewing
conditions resulting in exactly the same information content. Now you
are changing your comparison to one of less information to begin with
and having to change conditions to obtain more information. That is
neither unexpected nor a sequitur to your previous statement.
Your analysis has been leaving out the human factor of incoming
images being interpreted by the brain. One set of bits can convey
significantly different and *new* information than another set of bits,
i.e. the 'words added to their forehead' example, or the steganography
example, for us humans.
I suggest you back and read my original post in this thread - sharpening
the image enhances the contrast of details in the image which would
otherwise be lost by subsequent stages of the image viewing process. I
have never contended that some parts of the information contained in the
image is more significant to its interpretation or more resilient
against loss through stages of the imaging process than others - indeed
that is the crux of my original method! However, that specifically
exploits the inefficiency of the image as an information medium so that
unused "information space" can be exploited to make real information
more robust to the losses in the process stages. It does not mean that
the image contains more information than it previously did - neither
resolution nor signal to noise ratio in any spatial frequency band have
changed so the amount of information contained in the image remains
unchanged. This is the entire principle of pre-emphasis!
It would be impolite to remind you that *you* introduced the term
"amount of information" to contest my comments in your post of Fri, 30
Jan 2004 19:09:00GMT reference <
[email protected]>,
however it is there on record and publicly accessible to all who doubt
that you did! Since then that is what the discussion has addressed -
the total amount of information in the image. There is no point in now
changing your argument back to relative importance or robustness of the
information since that is exactly back on the path that *you* decided to
divert from!
