Forgot to close the loop on this one and was traveling last week.
I've gone back to the science folks with the suggestion that we experiment
with 16 bits. I suspect that you're right and 16 bits will be good enough.
It is good to know that we can play with it a bit, provided that we keep
under th
Your understanding is correct. For reference, using only 16 bits was
convenient to avoid overflowing the field length, but storage efficiency
was a motivation as well. Using 32 bits per frequency instead of 16 would
significantly increase the size of the inverted index.
We could look into what it
