Limitations of Human Perception with the Reading of Instruments using Information Theory (On the Occasion of the 50~(th) Anniversary of the Foundation of Shannon's Information Theory)

摘要

The paper presents the results of investigations with a group of students dealing with the accuracy of reading of instruments using information theory. After a short introduction to information theory and Shannon's channel capacity at first a relation between the reading error and the reading time is obtained leading to results with reference to the limiting (critical) frequencies obtainable. Using these results the channel capacity may be calculated. Comparing these quantities of the channel capacity with other values obtained from the literature it follows the same order of magnitude of 10 bits per second. At least consequences of these fact using once again information theory are deduced. Due to the development of microelectronics digital methods with decreasing approximation errors as well as with decreasing cut-off and aliasing errors will be the future.