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
encoding algorithm:
emit('.')
for char in string:
sleep(char-32)
emit('.')
this does have the edge case that a space is encoded as no go between dots.
it could be shifted to char-31 or we could design the decoder to consider sub-1s delays as being 0
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
morgan