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In information theory, redundancy refers to the part of a message that is not freely chosen by the sender but obeys statistical rules governing the use of symbols. It represents an indicator of reliability or predictability. According to Gilles Willett, the more redundant a message is, the less information it contains. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver emphasize that it is preferable to limit message encoding in the presence of disturbances, so that redundancy can mitigate the negative effects of these disturbances on message comprehension.

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