A few people have asked me how I came to the name Signal 2 Noise. I realise that, while it is obvious to me, it may not be as obvious to some of you. Names are important; they kind of have an energy of their own, and they usually have embedded within them the blue prints to the entity being named, i.e. my newsletter and research portal.
The name comes from the Signal-to-Noise Ratio, known in mathematical and engineering terms as SNR, a concept that comes from an engineering origin and is a fundamental law of information-theory.
I have always been fascinated by how we talk into our mobile phones in a noisy environment, sending soundwaves through the air only to be received on the other end with mostly the voice sounding exactly the same and very little if any background noise. How does it work? The answer is the technology works by incorporating the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
Most of you will not have heard of Claude Shannon a man who many describe as the cleverest person of the 20th century. He is the father of information theory and was the inspiration to John Larry Kelly Jr. a scientist at Bell Labs who went on to modify his classic information theory of SNR into the worlds most powerful betting algorithm. If you like probabilities and you haven’t delved into the Kelly criterian then you don’t know what you are missing. You will hear a lot about Kelly in the months and years to come on S2N.
Why S2N not SNR
The reason why I chose Signal 2 Noise (S2N) and not Signal 2 Noise Ratio (SNR) is that my goal is to be more precise. The truth is S2N = SNR, but my goal is not to tell you how strong the signal is by providing you with a ratio highlighting the relative strength of the signal against the backdrop of random noise. I wanted to focus exclusively on the signal. My aim is to drop ratio and all reference to noise with a strong focus on the signal.