Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In particular, if b is a positive integer, then the unit is the amount of information that can be stored in a system with b possible states. When b is 2, the unit is the shannon, equal to the information content of one "bit". A system with 8 possible states, for example, can store up to log 2 8 = 3 bits of information. Other units that have ...
In information theory, one bit is the information entropy of a random binary variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability, [3] or the information that is gained when the value of such a variable becomes known. [4] [5] As a unit of information or negentropy, the bit is also known as a shannon, [6] named after Claude E. Shannon.
An example: The weather forecast broadcast is: "Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued darkness until widely scattered light in the morning." This message contains almost no information. However, a forecast of a snowstorm would certainly contain information since such does not happen every evening.
The bit is a typical unit of information. It is 'that which reduces uncertainty by half'. [6] Other units such as the nat may be used. For example, the information encoded in one "fair" coin flip is log 2 (2/1) = 1 bit, and in two fair coin flips is log 2 (4/1) = 2 bits.
The information content can be expressed in various units of information, of which the most common is the "bit" (more formally called the shannon), as explained below. The term 'perplexity' has been used in language modelling to quantify the uncertainty inherent in a set of prospective events.
But on a little-endian machine, one would see "N H O J". Middle-endian machines complicate this even further; for example, on the PDP-11, the 32-bit value is stored as two 16-bit words "JO" "HN" in big-endian, with the characters in the 16-bit words being stored in little-endian, resulting in "O J N H". [citation needed]
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1] [2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.
This table illustrates an example of an 8 bit signed decimal value using the two's complement method. The MSb most significant bit has a negative weight in signed integers, in this case -2 7 = -128. The other bits have positive weights. The lsb (least significant bit) has weight 1. The signed value is in this case -128+2 = -126.