Engineering Perfection. What does it mean for a system to be perfect?

A clear-cut claim to “perfection” is the notion of “fidelity” in a transmission channel. In Shannon’s Information Theory, the fidelity of a perfect channel is the total correspondence between a sequence of signals transmitted from a source and the sequence received at the destination. I will assess the concept of a transmission channel to see whether and under what circumstances it may be credited with the property of perfection. I will answer in positive, but doubts will remain. There could be a way out of such uncertainties, if the idea of perfection was reformulated in terms related to modal logic. To support this plan, I have preliminarily to make sure what did “perfection” mean to philosophers and logicians. I will briefly examine the way how St. Anselm, Leibniz and Gödel used the concept of perfection for proving the existence of God. Gödel’s modal concepts should lead us to define perfection as an ontologically possible property. Under such conditions, the concept of perfect channel or system of engineering and computational disciplines can be credible.