In 1956, a physicist named John Kelly working at Bell Labs published a paper titled A New Interpretation of Information Rate. In the paper he draws an analogy between the outcomes of a gambling game and the transmission of symbols over a communications channel. For a positive expectation game, Kelly showed that a betting system based on a fixed fraction of the bankroll can make the bankroll grow at an exponential rate in the long run. The exponential growth rate in this case is directly analogous to the rate of information transmission through a communications channel. This book examines the...