The Bit Player

This is a tremendously good telling of Claude Shannon's work, career and impact which I think will be a great help in giving him the wide recognition he deserves. Someone said it's "not quite a documentary" which is not a criticism though and it takes few liberties with the facts, unlike the Imitation Game for example!

Utterly charming. Ok, I am extremely biased (see below). Even so, this film portrays a man who was not only extraordinarily clever, but also incredibly curious. This happy coincidence of talents gave Claude Shannon an almost super-human ability to play, invent, and discover new 'toys' (which we would now call artificial intelligence), and new mathematical theorems (which we now call information theory).

The film is mainly a re-enactment of a series of insightful interviews at Shannon's home during the 1980s. The acting is very fine, especially John Hutton who gives a genuine flavour of how Shannon would have been in his later years. We know this because the interview is inter-cut with snippets of home movies of Shannon riding his many unicycles (whilst juggling), and demonstrating his artificial mouse as it learns to navigate a maze. Background material is supplied by his son and daughter, who clearly loved the intellectual playfulness of their child-father. The technical commentary is finely balanced, giving just enough detail to let the audience know how relevant Shannon's work is to modern information systems.

With regard to the importance of Shannon's work, even though he was not alone in trying to solve one of the key scientific problems of his time (i.e. how to define and measure information), he was alone in being able to produce a complete mathematical theory of information: a theory that might otherwise have taken decades to construct. In effect, Shannon single-handedly accelerated the rate of scientific progress, and it is entirely possible that, without his contribution, we would still be treating information as if it were some ill-defined vital fluid.

A question repeated throughout the film is: Who is Claude Shannon? We should all know who Claude Shannon is. Sadly, because his work did not shorten a war (as far as we know), or involve any other dramatic world events, we are unlikely to see his life made into a movie like The Imitation Game (about Alan Turing). This is a monumental pity. As one commentator said, science fiction books sometimes quote the current year, not as BC, or BP, but AS (After Shannon, who died in 2001). That is how important he should be.

Finally (and this is why I am biased), I think Shannon's theory of information (1948) is simply beautiful.

James V Stone, 27th June, 19 (AS).

Let me make this clear from the start. My review is in no way targeted at the real Mr. Shannon, who indeed was a great and very interesting man.

I am very much talking about this so called documentary, which fails at almost every level. What made me quit it about halfway through though was the absolutely abysmal acting of Judith Ivey and even more John Hutton as Mrs. and Mr. Shannon.

I have rarely seen such merciless and annoying overplaying. Any person from the street would have done a better job and it totally destroyed the rest for me.

This was not a documentary, but a totally failed attempt at quote - entertainment - based on facts. A mumbling and nervously laughing John Hutton pretending to be Claude Shannon makes it a really bad TV-movie and I am not into that.

The problem with this documentary is the acted out interviews of Claude Shannon, his wife and the interviewer... who all unfortunately come across as amateur actors even though they aren't. The pausing for every thought is tedious to watch. The construct detracts from the actual information contained in the documentary and seems to take up at least a third of the overall running time. It made me think that I was watching some sort of mockumentary at first.

So few people have heard of Claude Shannon, and his impact is bigger than all of the household names. He sought a "universal theory of communication" for the accurate and efficient transmission of information. The documentary succeeds in explaining concepts simply and clearly. The film also links Shannon's interests in Information and communication to his early interests in codes. Commissioned by the IEEE Society, The Bit Player is the perfect title for this informative film portraying the "father of information theory".