The Entropy of LEGO®

Andrew Crompton
Additional contact information
Andrew Crompton: School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, Leverhulme Building, Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 3BX, England

Environment and Planning B, 2012, vol. 39, issue 1, 174-182

Abstract: Can the information content of a building be given meaning? Provided it can be modeled as a set of repeating parts the entropy of those parts can be measured. One way to do this is to make a LEGO® model then base the calculation on how many pieces of each type have been used. It is claimed that Lego is a language-like method of representing the built environment and that Lego pieces are analogous to words because their rank–frequency distribution follows a Zipf–Mandelbrot distribution similar to words in English. The zero-order entropy of Lego was measured to be about 8.5 bits, compared with 9.4 bits per word of English. Lego models of famous buildings were found to have entropy of between 6 and 10 bits per piece, giving a quantitative measure of how unusual their pieces were.

Keywords: Lego; language; information; Zipf–Mandelbrot (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/b37063 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirb:v:39:y:2012:i:1:p:174-182

DOI: 10.1068/b37063

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning B
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().