C00036554
| “ | It was decided, very wisely, that to mount so many threats in the Mediterranean would stretch the
Germans' credulity too far. Moreover, the fact that Sicily was almost the only objective not threatened might lead them to guess the truth. To prevent this the simulated threats to north and west France, Pantelleria and Lampedusa were abandoned. |
” |
Though the foregoing discussion is deliberately (over)simplified1 it clearly illustrates the principle of A-deception.
As an aside to those readers with a mathematical bent, it is tempting to use concepts from information theory in order to characterize or quantify uncertainty/ambiguity produced by A-deception. Though it may be a convenient mental shorthand, it lacks operational significance, as Vazsonyi (40) has shown in a decision-theoretic context. Specifically, he shows via a simple (and highly readable) example that the benefits (value or utility} of information systems are not directly related to concepts of uncertainty, reduction of Wiener-Shannon uncertainty or entropy. It is, in fact, trivially easy to construct decision-theoretic examples where the entropy is high yet the value of information is zero, as well as problems where the entropy is low and the value of information is high.
