Novelty, Information and Surprise

Günther Palm studied mathematics in Hamburg and Tübingen. After completing his studies in mathematics (Master in 1974, Ph.D. in 1975) he worked on nonlinear systems, associative memory and brain theory at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. In 1983/84 he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. From 1988 to 1991 he was professor for theoretical brain research at the University of Düsseldorf. Since then he has served as a professor for computer science and Director of the Institute of Neural Information Processing at the University of Ulm, where his focus is on information theory, pattern recognition, neural networks, and brain modelling.

• Surprise and Information of Descriptions: Prerequisites.- Improbability and Novelty of Descriptions.- Conditional Novelty and Information.- Coding and Information Transmission: On Guessing and Coding.- Information Transmission.- Information Rate and Channel Capacity: Stationary Processes and Information Rate.- Channel Capacity.- Shannon's Theorem.- Repertoires and Covers: Repertoires and Descriptions.- Novelty, Information and Surprise of Repertoires.- Conditioning, Mutual Information and Information Gain.- Information, Novelty and Surprise in Science: Information, Novelty and Surprise in Brain Theory.- Surprise from Repetitions and Combination of Surprises.- Entropy in Physics.-  Generalized Information Theory: Order- and Lattice-Structures.-  Three Orderings on Repertoires.- Information Theory on Lattices of Covers.- Bibliography.- Index.