Abstract
One of the fundamental problems of information theory, since its foundation by C. Shannon, has been the computation of the capacity of a discrete memoryless channel, a quantity expressing the maximum rate at which information can travel through the channel. In this paper, we investigate the properties of a novel approach to computing the capacity, based on a continuous-time dynamical system. Interestingly, the proposed dynamical system can be regarded as a continuous-time version of the classical Blahut-Arimoto algorithm, and we can prove that the former shares with the latter an exponential rate of convergence if certain conditions are met. Moreover, a circuit design is presented to implement the dynamics, hence enabling analog computation to estimate the capacity.