Imagine you're encoding morse in a protocol that has only an instant pulse. you can't do a dash, only dots.
But you can encode a dot as two dots with a short gap between them, and a dash by two dots with a long gap between them.
And you can of course merge adjacent dots: V is ···-, but you don't need eight dots to represent that, you need 5:
dot-short-dot-short-dot-short-dot-long-dot
and an extra-long gap between two dots is a space
if my math is correct, you encode "hello world" in 39 dots
this was originally going to be a math problem but I think I figured it out by the end, so I just posted it in case anyone found it interesting or can point out a way I'm fucking up.
I'm a bit sleep-deprived at the moment so I could easily be very wrong
@foone
So, you need a start dot dot so the receiver knows how long a dot gap is, and a quiet period so it knows where the sequence ends, and maybe an extra dot before that, or lack of one that signals whether there are more dots than dashes so it knows it got things right.
Where have I seen this before?
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
RealGene ☣️