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Foundations of the Digital (Discrete) Revolution.
We are approaching the end of the revolution of going from
signaling with continuous signals to signaling with discrete pulses,
and we are now probably moving from using pulses to using
solitons as the basis for our discrete signaling. Many signals occur
in Nature in a continuous form (if you disregard the apparent
discrete structure of things built out of molecules and electrons).
Telephone voice transmission, musical sounds, heights and weights
of people, distance covered, velocities, densities, etc. are examples
of continuous signals. At present we usually convert the continuous
signal almost immediately to a sampled discrete signal; the
sampling being usually at equally spaced intervals in time and the
amount of the signal being quantized to a comparatively few levels.
Quantization is a topic we will ignore in these chapters, though it
is important in some situations, especially in large scale computations
with numbers.
Why has this revolution happened?
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