Computing,Cognition and Information Compression

Abstract

This article develops the idea that the storage and processing of information in computers and in brains may often be understood as information compression.

The article first reviews what is meant by information and, in particular, what is meant by redundancy, a concept which is fundamental in all methods for information compression.

Principles of information compression are described.

The major part of the article describes how these principles may be seen in a range of observations and ideas in computing and cognition: the phenomena of adaptation and inhibition in nervous systems; ‘neural’ computing; the creation and recognition of ‘objects’ and ‘classes’ in perception and cognition; stereoscopic vision and random-dot stereograms; the organisation of natural languages; the organisation of grammars; the organisation of functional, structured, logic and object-oriented computer programs; the application and de-referencing of identifiers in computing; retrieval of information from databases; access and retrieval of information from computer memory; logical deduction and resolution theorem proving; inductive reasoning and probabilistic inference; parsing; normalisation of databases.