The mission of our society is to support the open exchange of ideas in information theory. I am excited to write this inaugural President’s column for the IEEE Information Theory Society’s new BITS magazine. The concept of a magazine has been discussed in our society for many years, going back at least to 2015. It took the intense effort of [...]

One of Claude Shannon’s best remembered “toys” was his maze-solving machine, created by partitions on a rectangular grid. A mechanical mouse was started at one point in the maze with the task of finding cheese at another point. Relays under the board guided successive moves, each of which were taken in the first open counterclockwise direction from the previ...