4 ms·
> whatever the nature of the information — be it a Shakespeare sonnet, a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or a Kurosawa movie — it is always most efficie
by jonplackett 6y ago
> whatever the nature of the information — be it a Shakespeare sonnet, a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or a Kurosawa movie — it is always most efficient to encode it into bits before transmitting it
I had always assumed there were practical reason for using bits - eg it being easier to store in digital memory, or that it was in another technical way too hard to have a higher base than 2.
I didn’t realise it is preferable that way because it’s more efficient to transfer information in bits. It seems counter intuitive.
- k__ 6y agoI always had the impression digital encoding was less efficient than analog, because because transforming sound waves to electro magnetic waves was more straight forward.
- rthomas6 6y agoWith digital encoding, you have a defined bandwidth you have to care about (the audible range of frequencies), which puts a limit on how often you need to represent the state of the wave. Also, digital transmission does fancy things with phase, amplitude, and frequency combined to represent multiple bits at once.
- nl 6y ago> less efficient In what sense? > because because transforming sound waves to electro magnetic waves was more straight forward This sounds like you might mean power efficiency. I don't know if that is true or not. But in this case they are talking bandwidth efficiency.
- rthomas6 6y agoThe trick is what the encoded sequence of bits represents. You have lossless "compression" built into the encoding of almost any kind of information because it by definition has repetition of some kind (if it didn't, it would be random noise).
- cameldrv 6y agoI don’t think that’s right. What Shannon’s channel capacity theorem says is that a channel with a certain bandwidth and SNR can carry a certain rate of information. It doesn’t matter how the source information is encoded. Actual modern signals on a transmission line, like gigabit Ethernet or your cable modem are not just on and off pulses, they are complex analog waveforms. The reason for bits being the normal representation of information is that they’re easy to do math on, and in a computer, digital logic is much more efficient in binary than in higher number bases.
- jonplackett 6y agoIs it the source you think is incorrect or have I misinterpreted its meaning?