Abstract
Information is stored in computers as strings of bits. For example, each letter, number and punctuation mark of English text in my computer is encoded with a unique string of seven bits defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII, a 128-character alphabet listed in Table B.1 on page 274 in Appendix B.
Today’s most common computers use eight bits per character in a 256-element alphabet, because this simplifies and standardizes hardware designs. With ASCII data, the eighth bit can be used for some other purpose, such as parity-error detection, described in Section 6.2 further on. The eighth bit depends on the previous seven and is therefore redundant, adding to the cost of information storage and transmission.
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© 2010 Birkhäuser Boston
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Wickerhauser, M.V. (2010). Redundancy and Information. In: Mathematics for Multimedia. Applied and Numerical Harmonic Analysis. Birkhäuser Boston. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-8176-4880-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-8176-4880-0_6
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