Information?

In 2008, my then 12 year old son Jack (linktree) had the misfortune to be locked in a hotel room in Venice all day while I attended a conference. To keep him occupied, he had a macintosh computer and I taught him a simple paint program that allowed one to create 16 x 16 pixel arrays, which at that time was the resolution of the icon that appears in a browser tab.

Each pixel could be chosen to be one of a small set of colours. That was the whole of the creative palette available to him. On my way out the door, he asked me to set him some challenges. What should he draw in a 16 x 16 pixel array? I threw some impossible goals at him, and came back to find he had met every one, far beyond what I thought possible with such a limited set of tools.

Here is the “1879 Anglo-Zulu War”, transferred by me to canvas, but clearly preserving the original pixels:

The 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, by Jack Cummins, age 12

This work clearly demonstrates the insufficiency of any theory of information.