Are all encoding methods the same?
September 15, 1998

• We have seen in the telegraph example that clever encoding can reduce the transmission time.
• Morse encoding is more efficient than ASCII encoding.
• Morse coding takes advantage of the fact that characters like ``e'' or ``r'' occur more frequently than ``x'' or ``z.''
• Morse assigned short codes to frequently occurring characters and longer codes to rare characters.
• The effect is that on average fewer ``bits'' are transmitted.
• The ability to design efficient binary representations has contributed significantly to the success of digital communication systems. There is no comparable technique for analog communications.
• Questions:
  • Is there a systematic way to design good codes (binary representations)?
  • Is there a limit for the efficiency of an encoding method?
  • What determines the efficiency of a good encoding method?