Observations

• Transmission of the ASCII encoded text ECE requires 12 symbols.
• Transmission of the Morse coded text ECE requires 6 symbols.
• With ASCII encoding all characters are represented by 8 binary symbols.
• Hence, we know that a new character begins after 8 bits.
• In other words, ``spaces'' are used only to mark the pause between bits.
• In Morse code, ``spaces'' are used to mark pauses between bits, characters, and words.
• The fact that fewer symbols are required (on average) with Morse code is based on two factors:

  1.

  The alphabet that Morse encoded consists of only 26 different characters, while the ASCII code encodes 128 characters.

  2.

  Morse assigned codes of different length to different characters; frequently occuring characters are assigned short codes, and rare characters have longer codes.

• We will investigate, the problem of designing efficient ways of encoding information later.