NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 05 May 2012 04:11:48 -0500 From: "Chris Uppal" Newsgroups: comp.programming References: <12217875.401.1335542191031.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@ynjj38> <1222f8a7-5218-4a58-8104-c401d8725213@t23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: quantifying bloat Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 10:11:47 +0100 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.5512 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.5512 X-RFC2646: Format=Flowed; Original Message-ID: Lines: 21 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-AuthenticatedUsername: NoAuthUser X-Trace: sv3-Wl9NFNGSDJSIZZnUv4oB0Ccwnmc5rcSY9lgt7vxCHsjJCMaEupdsARSbqyCYKBAgpXKc/Gyyk8S76ti!+OsSDsrd3H+8liyfxluPbVXyBaC1Iih0RQ2Bycf6I/5+N+aPaO5odo17Xj+cpvhnp9m65RfTwZs= X-Complaints-To: abuse@btinternet.com X-DMCA-Complaints-To: abuse@btinternet.com X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 2112 Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.stben.net!border3.nntp.ams.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.ams.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.ams.giganews.com!nntp.bt.com!news.bt.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: csiph.com comp.programming:1538 James Dow Allen wrote: > Anyway, the article claimed that Natural Language requires a > *compromise* between information and redundancy: It's the > redundancy that keeps the information from appearing to be > plain noise. Reminds me a bit of the claims I've seen (sorry, can't remember where, but I've seen it more than once), that searching for extra-terrestrial signals is pointless because any civilisation advanced enough to send such a signal would also know how to compress it to the point where we couldn't tell it apart from random noise. But that can't be true: if there is a possibility of errors in the transmission, then there /has/ to be redundancy in the signal. I don't know whether the various searches for ETI are actually looking for checksums, but it doesn't seem like a bad idea ;-) -- chris