3 ms·
But actually, no. Because you could set up HTTHTTTHHHHHHHHHH the format like this: 01001000 11001010 That's sixteen bits for 17 coinflips. With no continu
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
But actually, no. Because you could set up HTTHTTTHHHHHHHHHH the format like this:
01001000
11001010
That's sixteen bits for 17 coinflips. With no continuous sequences longer than seven, this format takes up one extra bit every seven flips.
How does it work? The first bit is a sign bit. If it's zero, the next seven bits are raw coinflips, 0 for tails, 1 for heads. If it's one, the second bit signifies whether the next sequence consists of heads or tails (again, 0 for tails, 1 for heads), and the remaining six bits tell how long said sequence is.
This is a fairly simple encoding for the strategy described in the article, which I thought of off the top of my head in about five minutes, and I know nothing about compression. It's slightly broken (what if the sequence ends mid-byte?), but it does kind of work. Somebody who actually knows about compression could probably do this better.
- andrepd 10y agoI know that, the point is that this kind of stuff needs some thought, it's not so simple as "HTHTHTHT" = "HT five times". The article kind of glosses over that.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWell, yes. Many programmers have trouble mapping ideas into bits: imagine how hard it is for people aren't in programming?
- setr 10y agoIn the context of the analogy, it's probably better to read it as saving time to human-parse rather than the space required to send. (And it definitely takes less time to verbally state, even if the sentence is clearly longer; caching) The general idea is the same through; compression by describing patterns rather than explicitly stating the event
- setr 10y agoIn the context of the analogy, it's probably better to read it as saving time to human-parse rather than the space required to send. (And it definitely takes less time to verbally state, even if the sentence is clearly longer; caching) The general idea is the same through; compression by describing patterns rather than explicitly stating the event