2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/169620The minimization of Gibbs free energy is based on the changes in work and free energy that occur in a physical or chemical system. The maximization of mutual information, the capacity, of a noisy channel is determined based on the marginal probabilities and conditional entropies associated with a communications system. As different as the procedures might first appear, through the exploration of a simple, "dual use" Ising model, it is seen that the two concepts are in fact the same. In particular, the case of a binary symmetric channel is calculated in detail.6 pages, 3 figuresStatistical MechanicsInformation Theorytext