Every thought is a throw of dice. Stephane Mallarme This book is the last one of a trilogy which reports a part of our research work over nearly thirty years (we discard our non-conventional results in automatic control theory and applications on the one hand, and fuzzy sets on the other), and its main key words are Information Theory, Entropy, Maximum Entropy Principle, Linguistics, Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, Fractals, Fractional Brownian Motion, Stochastic Differential Equations of Order n, Stochastic Optimal Control, Computer Vision. Our obsession has been always the same: Shannon's information theory should play a basic role in the foundations of sciences, but subject to the condition that it be suitably generalized to allow us to deal with problems which are not necessarily related to communication engineering. With this objective in mind, two questions are of utmost importance: (i) How can we introduce meaning or significance of information in Shannon's information theory? (ii) How can we define and/or measure the amount of information involved in a form or a pattern without using a probabilistic scheme? It is obligatory to find suitable answers to these problems if we want to apply Shannon's theory to science with some chance of success. For instance, its use in biology has been very disappointing, for the very reason that the meaning of information is there of basic importance, and is not involved in this approach.

For four decades, information theory has been viewed almost exclusively as a theory based upon the Shannon measure of uncertainty and information, usually referred to as Shannon entropy. Since the publication of Shannon's seminal paper in 1948, the theory has grown extremely rapidly and has been applied with varied success in almost all areas of human endeavor. At this time, the Shannon information theory is a well established and developed body of knowledge. Among its most significant recent contributions have been the use of the complementary principles of minimum and maximum entropy in dealing with a variety of fundamental systems problems such as predic tive systems modelling, pattern recognition, image reconstruction, and the like. Since its inception in 1948, the Shannon theory has been viewed as a restricted information theory. It has often been argued that the theory is capable of dealing only with syntactic aspects of information, but not with its semantic and pragmatic aspects. This restriction was considered a v~rtue by some experts and a vice by others. More recently, however, various arguments have been made that the theory can be appropriately modified to account for semantic aspects of in formation as well. Some of the most convincing arguments in this regard are in cluded in Fred Dretske's Know/edge & Flow of Information (The M.LT. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1981) and in this book by Guy lumarie.

Every thought is a throw of dice. Stephane Mallarme This book is the last one of a trilogy which reports a part of our research work over nearly thirty years (we discard our non-conventional results in automatic control theory and applications on the one hand, and fuzzy sets on the other), and its main key words are Information Theory, Entropy, Maximum Entropy Principle, Linguistics, Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, Fractals, Fractional Brownian Motion, Stochastic Differential Equations of Order n, Stochastic Optimal Control, Computer Vision. Our obsession has been always the same: Shannon's information theory should play a basic role in the foundations of sciences, but subject to the condition that it be suitably generalized to allow us to deal with problems which are not necessarily related to communication engineering. With this objective in mind, two questions are of utmost importance: (i) How can we introduce meaning or significance of information in Shannon's information theory? (ii) How can we define and/or measure the amount of information involved in a form or a pattern without using a probabilistic scheme? It is obligatory to find suitable answers to these problems if we want to apply Shannon's theory to science with some chance of success. For instance, its use in biology has been very disappointing, for the very reason that the meaning of information is there of basic importance, and is not involved in this approach.