Text, Bytes and Videotape

Summary

A one-day Masterclass suitable for 16-18 year old students to be held on 9 December 2003.

Modern communication systems have been developed during the last few decades and depend largely on the work of Claude Shannon (1916-2001). He worked at Bell Laboratories as a mathematician, where he made major contributions to the theory of coding, cryptography and computing circuit design.

Coded 'messages' can take up a lot of room, so data compression has become an important aspect of modern information theory. This conference is about how codes are used for transmission of information, and how they are checked and corrected for errors.

Schools participating in this conference are located in Essex and Sutton Coldfield.

Talk

• Introduction. The first part of Olly Johnson's talk
• Information Theory. Second part of Olly Johnson's talk
• Coding. Third part of Olly Johnson's talk
• Error Correction and Detection. Fourth part of Olly Johnson's talk

Project work

• First task. for students to carry out during the masterclass.
• Answers to first task.
• Task 2.
• Answers to Task 2.
• Task 3. Finding the entropy of events; working with logs to base 2
• Answers to Task 3.
• Task 4. Using check digits to detect errors
• Answers to Task 4.
• Task 5. Investigation of Hamming code
• Answers to Task 5.

Additional material

• Supporting material for first task. Notes on finding the mean of a probability distribution, and finding the minimum of a quadratic function.
• Supporting notes for Task 3. covering use of the Sigma notation; calculating logs to base 2 using Excel or a graphic calculator, or using the log laws; calculating probabilities from bookmakers' odds.