What is an ID proponent's basis of comparison? (edited)

it means no such thing. It means the search is better than a random search for these types of problems.No one is arguing that the search is in any way optimal.

You are simply wrong!"MY HOUSE IS BIG"
"MY HOUSE IS BIG"has twice the information content as
"MY HOUSE IS BIG"This is very basic!To claim it has the same information content is just silly!Lets keepit simple. By your claim the string 1 has the same information as the string 11. But then the string 1111 has the same content as 1 no?In fact you could repeat the 1 5459795 times and still only have the same information content as in the string 1?Now if you convert 5459795 to hex, and make three pairs it can be interpreted as the string "SOS" using the standard ASCII notation.So by you claim we can incode the string "SOS" in just one bit?In fact using standard ASCII we can encode any random finite length text string as just one number, lets call it N.You can then represent that number as N repetitions of a string. Your claim is that N repetitions of a string has the exact same information content as the string itself.Thus any string has the same information content?Either your definition of information content is seriously screwed, or you are mistaken.

My problem is that SO seems to make an awful lot of assumptions regarding how to measure information.I forget the specifics of Shannons theory, since its been, hmm, to many years since university.But of course context matters. I remember an example with child birth. The father to be is outside the door, and he desperately needs to know the sex of the newborn.Now The nurse might come out the door and say "It's a boy", a message which is 10 characters long, but they could have agreed on a protocol, such that she just displayed either a black or white piece of paper in the window in the door, white for boy and black for girl.The information content would be the same for the father. But this is just because the set of possible messages is exactly 2, so either way she could at most communicate 1 bit of information.Now claiming that
MY HOUSE IS BIG
MY HOUSE IS BIGhas the same information content as
MY HOUSE IS BIGis just silly, when you do not specify any context. As my simple example showed, repeating the message can communicate more information. And indeed it must, since even if you get no new information about his house when he repeats the statement, you still gain new knowledge, since you now know he said it twice.Since we are talking about biological entities, we should look at DNA. I know nothing of how it works, beyond a cartoonish impression,
but to take our analogy to the breaking point, will duplicating a gene never ever have any effect on the phenotype of an organism.Notice however that this a question quite separate from whether there is more information or not.