[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 03:08:03PM -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
For a while now, I've wondered whether Morse code would be a better way
to do text messaging than what we have. Especially since Morse code
only takes a single button and did a sane job of Huffman encoding.
...
While Morse code does a good job with a single button, this isn't
exactly the same problem as Huffman encoding. Huffman encoding
requires that any string of ones and zeros be valid and assumes
that ones cost the same amount of time as zeros.
I consider Huffman encoding in the broad sense of "frequent things are
encoded with shorter sequences".
Despite the length of this string, the empirical evidence is that
Morse is fairly close to optimal. (You can quibble about things like
O, C, and Y having overly long encodings and M, W, X, and Z too
short.)
Well, it also may have to do with Morse reflecting the distribution of
English letters 150 years ago. Things may have changed.
-a
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
