Alcatel-Lucent is a communications company. In the past American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) was founded to provide communication technology to the United States and the world. Alexander Graham Bell, was instrumental in establishing Bell Labs. Claude Shannon invented Information Theory there. This mathematician was given an engineer´s job. How to send a message optimally? There was no figure of merit to provide that characterization. Shannon invented one:
I = -log2(1/p)
He called I the information, and p is the probability of the message. If the Sun does not show up tomorrow, (p almost zero), then we get a big amount of information. The logarithm in the above formula has base 2. We get 1 bit of information if a coin lands heads. This is the most random case, equal probability of heads or tails.
Today I write about Joe Lennert, a Lucent engineer that solved an engineering problem with scientific insight.
He invented a virtual machine that mimics the steps engineers take to do their job. He adds common sensical strategies to take care of failures, and finally writes the whole thing in a script language, k shell (ksh), invented by David Korn,, from AT&T.
He tells me that his machines keep tugging along doing Lucent´s bidding.
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