Re: VMs: The Key -- [case against "qo"]

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jonathan,

At 00:59 15/02/2004 -0800, Jonathan Lopez wrote:
> One of the more interesting this I have noticed is
> when translating certain texts that the english
> language has alot of redundent letters. For example
> "Q,C, and K" all useless letters. Looking at the VMS i
> get the feeling that alot of the "useless" letters are
> removed.

FWIW Peter Fenwick's (1997) classic text compression paper "Symbol Ranking 
Text Compression with Shannon Recodings" briefly describes Claude Shannon's 
1951 experiments into the predictability (information content) of English:-

        In 1951 C.E. Shannon published his classic paper on the 
information content of
        English text, establishing the well-known bounds of 0.6 ? 1.3 bits 
per letter [Shannon
        51]. What is perhaps less recognised is the method by which he 
obtained those results,
        and it is that which is used here as the basis of a text compressor.

        Shannon actually describes two methods. In both of them a person 
is asked to predict
        letters of a passage of English text. Shannon also shows that the 
responses to the
        predictions are equivalent to the original text and that an 
?identical twin? or its
        mathematical equivalent could be used to recover the original 
input. In both cases the
        person effectively prepares a ranked list of the probable symbols, 
most probable first,
        and presents this list to the comparator.

        1. In the first method, the person predicts the letter and is then 
told ?correct?, or is
        told the correct answer.

        2. In the second method, the person must continue predicting until 
the correct
        answer is obtained. The output is effectively the position of the 
symbol in the
        list, with the sequence of ?NO? and the final ?YES? responses a 
unary-coded
        representation of that rank or position.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.... 


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