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I don't think that's a valid argument for informational density. You have to whip up that font where something interesting maps to a low code point and then sha
by lvh 11y ago
I don't think that's a valid argument for informational density. You have to whip up that font where something interesting maps to a low code point and then share it ahead of time before you can take advantage of that alleged density. As an extreme example: if I create a Huffman tree where the bit string "1" maps to the entire concatenated contents of the Library of Congress, does that affect the information density of the Library of Congress?
- shuzchen 11y agoBut I'm not exactly making an argument for information density, except that "it's kinda a weird thing and we probably don't know how to calculate it without assuming a whole lotta things". In my opinion, your extreme example actually supports my argument. Yes, you have to "share it ahead of time", but that's precisely what happened with the ascii encoding. It's just ascii is built into most systems by default and codified by a standards body, whereas our ad-hoc encoding is not. But does that mean ascii is inherently denser? I wouldn't use ascii to communicate with aliens because to understand it you require knowledge of the majority of the english language (again, english knowledge is shared ahead of time). In fact, the Voyager Golden Record has line drawings on the cover, and not a single character.