Shannon's foundational 1948 paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, isn't just some academic footnote, it's a damn revolution in human understanding that laid the groundwork for our entire digital age. His work showed that entropy in information systems isn't just abstract math but that it's a statistical inevitability that emerges as data piles up.
Think about it: in a system with 99 red apples and 1 green one in a barrel, the entropy, that measure of uncertainty when you're blindly grabbing apples, will stabilize around exactly what you'd expect: a 99% chance of red, 1% chance of green. No matter how many times you reach in, that pattern holds true in the long run. The Universe doesn't bullshit with the math. With enough observations, the frequency distribution locks into its true value, creating order from what looked like randomness. This mathematical regularity of information is exactly what I've been getting at with Fundamental Code Theory, that binary states (on/off) represent a foundational encoding principle baked into literally every system capable of processing information. (https://paragraph.com/editor/d8DMLuR1TZ4PnrH3MS9C)
In both communication and physics, systems don't just wander around randomly, they find the path of least resistance, settling into states that minimize uncertainty (Shannon's territory) or action (Maupertuis' domain). The underlying mathematics points to something deeper: order doesn't fight randomness instead it emerges because of it. Maupertuis' principle boils down to this: physical stuff, whether it's light, planets, or particles, takes the fastest possible route from A to B. Not because it's thinking about it, but because that's just how reality shakes out. Imagine you're walking across a beach to reach the water: you'll naturally avoid the super soft sand that slows you down and the jagged rocks that require extra effort. You don't calculate this, you just do it. Nature works the same way, consistently finding paths that require the least energy expenditure over time. It's not complicated once you see it. It's just the Universe being efficient as hell.
The connection between these principles goes way beyond their original domains. Both reveal how complex systems, given enough iterations, inevitably optimize themselves. This isn't mystical. Tt's mathematical. It's what happens when probability distributions play out across vast numbers of interactions.
Human cognition and social behavior follow these same patterns. Individual decisions might seem unpredictable, but zoom out to population level and suddenly you see striking regularities everywhere. Our neural architecture itself is probably just another optimization system, one that minimizes prediction error while conserving energy, as predictive processing theories suggest. Free will? It might operate within constraints that themselves follow these optimization principles. Wild to think about.
Modern AI exploits this same principle: instead of modeling every possible path (which would be insane under current conditions), it leverages the statistical regularities, patterns born from the natural optimizations already present in real-world systems. Whether it's predicting language, behavior, or physical outcomes, intelligent systems win by finding the path of least resistance through probability space. Deep learning doesn't explicitly encode these optimization principles, it discovers them through exposure to data, just like evolution found efficient solutions without any conscious design. The success of variational methods and Bayesian approaches in AI just hammers home how minimizing uncertainty drives effective cognition.
From the heat of a gas to the uncertainty of a message, from planetary orbits to human thoughts, systems tend toward equilibrium through optimization. Shannon and Maupertuis didn't just describe isolated phenomena; they uncovered a shared structure of reality. And now, AI is making that structure visible, showing us that efficiency isn't just preferred, it's an emergent law arising from the statistical behavior of complex systems.
In the dance between entropy and action, nature doesn't waste motion or meaning. Intelligence, it turns out, may be Nature's way of learning to recognize itself but there is also a reward for dancing outside the lines. But more on that another time...
