What kind of information has the most value per bit?

Answer 1

A bit is a bit. It can convey only two values, 0 or 1. No matter what sort of information you are conveying, the bit is the same size unit. If your information has only two possible values (True or False, perhaps), you can store it as a single bit. Otherwise, you will have to use more than one bit, but the individual bits are still the same size. For example, 8 bits are capable of storing 2^8 combinations of 1's and 0's, and plain text (like in Notepad) is stored using 8 bits per character.

It could perhaps be argued that file formats which use compression (ZIP, RAR, JPG, MP3 or MPG for a few examples) contain more information per bit than their uncompressed counterparts. However, it would be more accurate to say that the compressed formats simply omit redundant information.

Answer 2

Well in information theory, if a message was a stream of bits that were all zero or all one, it would contain very little information. The most information is carried when the bits change most frequently. This is the case with compressed data as long repeated sequences are actually truncated or encoded in a much smaller form.

Answer 3

the information you use