Claude Shannon's development of information theory during World War II provided the next big step in understanding how much information could be reliably communicated through noisy channels. Building on Hartley's foundation, Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem (1948) describes the maximum possible efficiency of error-correcting methods versus levels of noise interference and data corruption.[5][6] The proof of the theorem shows that a randomly constructed error-correcting code is essentially as good as the best possible code; the theorem is proved through the statistics of such random codes.