6.050J | Spring 2008 | Undergraduate

Information and Entropy

Course Description

This course explores the ultimate limits to communication and computation, with an emphasis on the physical nature of information and information processing. Topics include: information and computation, digital signals, codes and compression, applications such as biological representations of information, logic …
This course explores the ultimate limits to communication and computation, with an emphasis on the physical nature of information and information processing. Topics include: information and computation, digital signals, codes and compression, applications such as biological representations of information, logic circuits, computer architectures, and algorithmic information, noise, probability, error correction, reversible and irreversible operations, physics of computation, and quantum computation. The concept of entropy is applied to channel capacity and to the second law of thermodynamics.
Learning Resource Types
Problem Sets with Solutions
Online Textbook
Programming Assignments
Historical schematic diagram of Morse telegraph.
The Morse telegraph. (Image courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.)