#428 How Claude Shannon Worked

The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone. But from dissatisfaction. Not the depressive kind of dissatisfaction, but rather a constructive dissatisfaction. Or a slight irritation when things don't look quite right. A genius is simply someone who

Who is usefully irritated. A genius must delight in finding solutions. Genius must derive joy from applications of intellect. Claude Shannon once said, I get a big kick out of seeing a clever way of doing some engineering problem. A clever design for a circuit, which uses a very small amount of equipment and gets a great deal of results out of it.

For Shannon, there was no substitute. For the pleasure of seeing net Results. So how would such a person go about solving a problem? Shannon proposed six strategies.

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