Coding Theory - II.
Two things should be clear from the previous lecture.
First, that we want the average length L of the message
sent to be as small as we can make it (to save the use of facilities).
Second, it must be a statistical theory since we cannot know the messages
that are to be sent, but we can know some of the statistics by using
past messages plus the inference that the future will probably be like
the past. For the simplest theory, which is all we can discuss here,
we will need the probabilities of the individual symbols occurring in a
message. How to get these is not part of the theory, but can be obtained
by the inspection of past experience, or imaginative guessing about the
future use of the proposed system you are designing.
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