This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed research papers contributed to a research project on the `General Theory of Information Transfer and Combinatorics' that was hosted from 2001-2004 at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) of Bielefeld University and also papers of several incorporated meetings thereof.
The 63 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on probabilistic models, cryptology, pseudo random sequences, quantum models, statistics, probability theory, information measures, error concepts, performance criteria, search, sorting, ordering, planning, language evolution, pattern discovery, reconstructions, network coding, combinatorial models, and a problem section.
The Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) of the University of Bielefeld hosted a research group under the title “General Theory of Information Transfer and Combinatorics,” abbreviated as GTIT-C, from October 1, 2001 to September 30, 2004. As head of the research group the editor shaped the group’s scientific directions and its personal composition.
He followed ideas, problems and results which had occupied him during the past decade and which seem to extend the frontiers of information theory in several directions. The main contributions concern information transfer by channels. There are also new questions and some answers in new models of source coding. While many of the investigations are in an explorative state, there are also hard cores of mathematical theories. In particular, a unified theory of information transfer was presented, which naturally incorporates Shannon’s Theory of Information Transmission and the Theory of Identification in the presence of noise as extremal cases. It provides several novel coding theorems. On the source coding side the concept of identification entropy is introduced. Finally, beyond information theory new concepts of solutions for probabilistic algorithms arose.
