## Wednesday, June 3, 2015

### At least a hint, Dr. Ewert?

Posted in The Skeptical Zone.

I repeat my invitation to Dr. Winston Ewert to join us here for discussion of several questions I raised. It helps immensely to display mathematical formulas, rather than talk about them vaguely. However, he has replied at Uncommon Descent, where that is impossible. I’m genuinely astonished to see:

Active information per query is defined to be the active information divided by the number of queries used to extract that information. We have commonly used the quantity of average active information per mean query which is the active information divided by the expected number of queries required to extract the information. English claims that the active information per query seems unrelated to active information but since the active information per query is simply the active information divided, its rather odd to claim they are unrelated.
In Active Information in Metabiology (2013), Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks define active information per mean query as $$I_\oplus = \frac{I_\Omega}{\overline{Q}},$$ where $I_\Omega$ and $\overline{Q}$ denote, respectively, the endogenous information and the mean number of queries a search requires to hit the target. (I’ve corrected a typo in Equation 6.*) Clearly, endogenous information, not active information, is divided by the mean number of queries.

What am I missing, Dr. Ewert?

* Here at Bounded Science, the o plus subscript of $I_\oplus$ replaces box plus in the original.