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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What are memes?
(a) Self-cloning genes.
(b) Repressive genes.
(c) Chromosomal genes.
(d) Bits of information.

2. How can memes be altered?
(a) Through mutation and manipulation.
(b) Through mutation.
(c) Through manipulation.
(d) After a serious illness.

3. What did Chaitin determine about most numbers?
(a) That they can be compressed to manageable entities.
(b) That they have complex alogarithms.
(c) That they are computable.
(d) That they are not computable.

4. What did mathematician Gregory Chaitin propose about Shannon's concept of entropy as uncertainty?
(a) It was related to randomness in numbers.
(b) It was related to the dynamism of numbers.
(c) It was related to infinity.
(d) That the theory was faulty.

5. What did cosmologist George Gamow immediately recognize about DNA as a code and proposed that it could be deciphered mathematically?
(a) It was dynamic and ever-changing.
(b) It was a code and it could be developed to duplicate.
(c) It was a code and it could be cloned.
(d) It was a code and it could be deciphered mathematically.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where is DNA found?

2. What does the word "cybernetics" mean?

3. What did Chaitin propose using to express a computable number into another form?

4. What library once helped writing from all over the known world?

5. What happened to the library that once held all known information?

Short Essay Questions

1. Norbert Weiner based his theory on what system of the human body?

2. What was Erwin Schrodinger's theory about "genes"?

3. What was the original meaning of the term "entropy"?

4. What did psychologist George Miller discover about a person's ability to remember?

5. What did IBM research Charle Bennet write about "information" in the 1980s?

6. What was the "Library of Babel" that was described in a story by Jorge Luis Borges?

7. What comparison does the author make to the famous library at Alexandria?

8. How did Erwin Schrodinger used the concept of "entropy"?

9. What was zoologist's Richard Dawkins' theory on DNA?

10. What was John von Neumann's theory on energy cost and how did Rolf Landauer disprove that concept?

(see the answer keys)

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