Tuesday 18 September 2012

Redundancy and Entropy




Redundancy is something that is highly predictable/expected and conforms to typical conventions. Redundancy is necessary in order to make effective communications. E.g. an image of clothes hanging on a line would be highly redundant but an image of cats hanging on a line would not be.

Entropy is something that is highly unpredictable and unexpected, it is the opposite of redundancy. Entropy makes things interesting by breaking conventions. E.g. An image of a house shaped like a tomato is highly entropic.



Redundancy and Entropy is culturally determined, something that is entropic to our culture may be less entropic or even redundant in other cultures.