this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not really, Morse code is not binary, but tertiary.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm guessing you're saying that because of the pauses? Otherwise I don't get it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, the space is a necessary symbol in Morse code, otherwise it's impossible to decode.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Right, Morse was actually mentioned as an example when I was learning Huffman encoding. :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

1.short signal 2.long signal 3.no signal

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd say it's quinary but can easily be represented binarily

  1. short mark, dot or dit ( ▄ ): 1

  2. longer mark, dash or dah ( ▄▄▄ ): 111

  3. intra-character gap (between the dits and dahs within a character): 0

  4. short gap (between letters): 000

  5. medium gap (between words): 0000000

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can do it with three symbols:

  1. Dot: 10
  2. Dash: 1110
  3. Gap: 00

The long gap between words is just three short gaps.

There's a Vsauce video about this: https://youtu.be/HY_OIwideLg

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

True, but with the other method it can directly be transferred into sound, one digit equals one beat.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not sure what you mean by optimized.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.