Designing an Experiment

• Since encoding methods are effective ``on average'' we should select a long message.
• That avoids the danger that the selected message is either very easy or very difficult to encode.
• A suitable candidate for our experiment is the text of the Constitution (see http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/constitution/constitution.html).
• When we retrieve that document it is represented in ASCII code inside the computer.
• In our experiment, we will seek a more compact (shorter) binary representation.
• This process is often called compression.
• Compression is used on computers to save space on hard disks.
• It is also used in mobile communication systems to transmit voice signals over the radio link.