Textbook of AI

1916–2001, Mathematician, electrical engineer, founder of information theory

Also known as: Claude Elwood Shannon, Claude E. Shannon

Claude Elwood Shannon founded information theory and gave digital computing its mathematical underpinnings. His 1937 master's thesis at MIT, sometimes called "the most important master's thesis of the twentieth century", proved that Boolean algebra could be used to design and simplify electrical switching circuits, the foundation of all subsequent digital hardware design.

In 1948 he published A Mathematical Theory of Communication in the Bell System Technical Journal. The paper introduced the bit as the fundamental unit of information, defined entropy as a measure of uncertainty in a probability distribution, established the source-coding theorem (which fixes the limits of lossless compression) and the noisy-channel coding theorem (which gives the maximum reliable rate of communication over a noisy channel). The framework underpins every digital communication system, every compression algorithm, and much of modern machine learning.

Shannon's contributions to AI are direct as well as foundational. He was a co-author of the 1955 Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence alongside John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester, the document that named the field. His 1950 paper Programming a Computer for Playing Chess set out minimax search with limited-depth lookahead and an evaluation function, the architecture used by every chess program for the next half-century. His mechanical mouse Theseus, built around 1950, was an early demonstration of machine learning in hardware: it learned to navigate a 5×5 maze using a relay-based memory.

He spent most of his career at Bell Labs and later at MIT. Famously playful, he juggled, rode a unicycle and built theatrical machines including the "Ultimate Machine", a box whose only function was to switch itself off. He developed Alzheimer's disease in his later years and died in 2001.