Science television shows are the main reason we have cable TV in my house. We recently saw a show in which researchers recorded dolphin squeaks to determine whether their sounds are a real language. The researchers claimed that word usage in all human languages follows a specific distribution, and they were going to determine whether dolphin sounds follow the same distribution. It turns out that they do.

This led the scientists to conclude that the dolphin’s language has the capacity to efficiently convey information, just like human language. Upon further research, I found that some SETI scientists are looking into using the same technique to determine whether signals from space contain noise or information.

This was my first taste of the well-established field of information theory. The cool thing about this approach is that you don’t have to actually understand the message. Instead, you statistically assess the structure to determine if it’s optimized for transferring information.

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