this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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I was gonna say “like, kind of” because of Morse code.
Ya beat me to it bro
Not really, Morse code is not binary, but tertiary.
I'd say it's quinary but can easily be represented binarily
short mark, dot or dit ( ▄ ): 1
longer mark, dash or dah ( ▄▄▄ ): 111
intra-character gap (between the dits and dahs within a character): 0
short gap (between letters): 000
medium gap (between words): 0000000
You can do it with three symbols:
The long gap between words is just three short gaps.
There's a Vsauce video about this: https://youtu.be/HY_OIwideLg
Looks right, but would that not already be optimized?
Not sure what you mean by optimized.
Optimized to use less symbols by combining them (long gap between words is just three short gaps). I also think if a sentence ends, there would be the unnessecary 0 from the dots and Dashes at the end.
Yeah, that extra 0 also irks me, it's the typical issue when concatenating words, that requires a trim() at the end.
But it's not an issue in terms of showing that you need three symbols to represent Morse code.
I'm guessing you're saying that because of the pauses? Otherwise I don't get it.
Yes, the space is a necessary symbol in Morse code, otherwise it's impossible to decode.
Makes sense. I remember asking myself whether Morse was a form of Huffman encoding back when I was learning that stuff. And it kinda is going for that, but without actually doing it properly since it wasn't a binary code per se and so could use the pauses. "Ternary" makes sense.
Right, Morse was actually mentioned as an example when I was learning Huffman encoding. :)
Unless I'm mistaken I would say that it's the other way around, Morse code is more like a human readable machine language expressed in binary because the 26 character alphabet is expressed in different binary values, much like ASCII.