3 ms·

Thanks, @espeed! I did a quick browse through the paper. I'm wondering why the focus seems to be on "trits" instead of bits.

• dgacmu 8y ago
  Bits already have an efficient encoding in binary. ;) Representing trits (0, 1, 2) efficiently in binary is harder. (Which is the subject of the paper. It's a great paper, and we lost a marvelous mind when Mihai died.)
• espeed 8y ago
  For more on trits, see Mihai's 2010 paper... An Alternative to Arithmetic Coding with Local Decodability (2010) [pdf] http://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/papers/trits/paper.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/mip/papers/trits/paper.pdf Changing base without losing space (2010) [pdf] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1806771 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1806771 (same paper as above, different title) "The ternary numeral system (also called base 3) has three as its base...a ternary digit (trit) is analogous to a bit. One trit is equivalent to log2 3 (about 1.58496) bits of information" [1]. NB: Base 3 is the integer base with the lowest average radix economy; however, base e has the lowest average radix economy overall [2]. [1] Ternary numeral system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system [2] Radix economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy [3] Three-valued logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic