Editing Information content (section)

== Notes ==
This measure has also been called '''surprisal''', as it represents the "[[surprise (emotion)|surprise]]" of seeing the outcome (a highly improbable outcome is very surprising). This term (as a log-probability measure) was introduced by [[Edward W. Samson]] in his 1951 report "Fundamental natural concepts of information theory".<ref name="samson53">
{{Cite journal| volume = 10| issue = 4, Summer 1953, special issue on information theory| pages = 283–297| last = Samson| first = Edward W.| title = Fundamental natural concepts of information theory| journal = ETC: A Review of General Semantics| date = 1953| url = https://www.jstor.org/stable/42581366| jstor = 42581366|orig-date = Originally published October 1951 as Tech Report No. E5079, Air Force Cambridge Research Center}}
</ref><ref name="attneave">{{cite book | last=Attneave | first=Fred | title=Applications of Information Theory to Psychology: A Summary of Basic Concepts, Methods, and Results |publisher=Holt, Rinehart and Winston | publication-place=New York| edition=1 | date=1959 }}</ref> An early appearance in the Physics literature is in [[Myron Tribus]]' 1961 book ''Thermostatics and Thermodynamics''.<ref name="Bernstein1972">{{cite journal | url=https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.1677983 | doi=10.1063/1.1677983 | title=Entropy and Chemical Change. I. Characterization of Product (And Reactant) Energy Distributions in Reactive Molecular Collisions: Information and Entropy Deficiency | date=1972 | last1=Bernstein | first1=R. B. | last2=Levine | first2=R. D. | journal=The Journal of Chemical Physics | volume=57 | issue=1 | pages=434–449 | bibcode=1972JChPh..57..434B | url-access=subscription }}</ref><ref name="Tribus1961">[http://www.eoht.info/page/Myron+Tribus Myron Tribus] (1961) '''Thermodynamics and Thermostatics:''' ''An Introduction to Energy, Information and States of Matter, with Engineering Applications'' (D. Van Nostrand, 24 West 40 Street, New York 18, New York, U.S.A) Tribus, Myron (1961), pp. 64–66 [https://archive.org/details/thermostaticsthe00trib borrow].</ref>

When the event is a random realization (of a variable) the self-information of the variable is defined as the [[expected value]] of the self-information of the realization.{{citation-needed|date=February 2025}}