Louis
Posts: 6436
Joined: Jan. 2006
|
| Quote (Kristine @ Mar. 23 2009,18:02) | | Quote (JonF @ Mar. 23 2009,11:37) | | Quote (Kristine @ Mar. 23 2009,11:12) | Cross-post - Joe, this is respectfully meant.
| Quote | Joe, excuse me. 665 characters including spaces do not add up to 665 bits of information in this context. Yes, until recently a character in computer programming took a bit of information storage (it's a little more now, due to formatting). No, that is not how one measures the information of this recipe.
It can have no more than 665 bits of information, but we are talking about memory storage here. One measures the information of a string in nits or nats (or nepits), in other words, in terms of entropy, expressed by the average number of bits needed for storage or communication.
I think you can now see that there is much redundancy in this recipe. Spaces are certainly redundancy. What are the other examples? |
Don't assume that everyone at AtBC is a man, please. |
Um, until recently a character in computer storage took a byte (eight bits). Nowadays many programs store each character in two bytes, using Unicode, which allows many more characters (e.g. Arabic, ...). Neither scheme stores formatting.
Of course, it's even worse for Joe. He forgot to define what a cup is, what a degree F is, what corn meal is, what flour is, what a minute is, ... all that is information required to make cornbread. |
Oops, you're right, it's byte (gaaa). Thank you. As for the formatting, I got that from some professor... Eek. *Blush* Oh well, if one never says anything stupid, one doesn't learn anything. :) |
Crikey! I must be the smartest person alive!
;-)
Louis
--------------
Bye.
|
