Math for Liberal Studies

 A binary code is a system for encoding data

made up of 0’s and 1’s
 Examples
 Postnet (tall = 1, short = 0)
 UPC (dark = 1, light = 0)
 Morse code (dash = 1, dot = 0)
 Braille (raised bump = 1, flat surface = 0)
 Movie ratings (thumbs up = 1, thumbs down = 0)
 CD, MP3, and DVD players, digital TV, cell
phones, the Internet, space probes, etc. all
represent data as strings of 0’s and 1’s rather
than digits 0-9 and letters A-Z
 Mostly, whenever information needs to be
transmitted from one location to another, a
binary code is used
 What are some problems that can occur when
data is transmitted from one place to
another?
 The two main problems are
 transmission errors: the message sent is not the
same as the message received
 security: someone other than the intended
recipient receives the message
 Suppose you were looking at a newspaper ad
for a job, and you see the sentence “must
have bive years experience”
 We detect the error since we know that
“bive” is not a word
 Can we correct the error?
 Why is “five” a more likely correction than
“three”?
 Suppose NASA is directing one of the Mars rovers by
telling it which crater to investigate
 There are 16 possible signals that NASA could send,
and each signal represents a different command
 NASA uses a 4-digit binary code to represent this
information
0000 0100 1000 1100
0001 0101 1001 1101
0010 0110 1010 1110
0011 0111 1011 1111
 The problem with this method is that if there
is a single digit error, there is no way that the
rover could detect or correct the error
 If the message sent was “0100” but the rover
receives “1100”, the rover will never know a
mistake has occurred
 This kind of error – called “noise” – occurs all
the time
 One way to try to avoid these errors is to send
the same message twice
 This would allow the rover to detect the
error, but not correct it (since it has no way of
knowing if the error occurs in the first copy of
the message or the second)
 There is a better way to allow the rover to
detect and correct these errors, and only
requires 3 additional digits
 The original message is four digits long
 We will call these digits I, II, III, and IV
 We will add three new digits, V, VI, and VII
 Draw three intersecting circles as shown here
 Digits V, VI, and VII should be
chosen so that each circle V I VI

contains an even number of II

III
IV
ones
VII
 The message we want to send is “0100”
 Digit V should be 1 so that the first circle has
two ones
 Digit VI should be 0 so that the second circle
has zero ones (zero is even!)
 Digit VII should be 1 so that 1 0 0

the last circle has two ones 1

0
0
 Our message is now 0100101
1
 Now watch what happens when there is a single digit error
 We transmit the message 0100101 and the rover receives
0101101
 The rover can tell that the second and third circles have
odd numbers of ones, but the first circle is correct
 So the error must be in the digit that is 1 0 0
in the second and third circles, but not
the first: that’s digit IV 0
1
1
 Since we know digit IV is wrong, there is 1
only one way to fix it: change it from 1 to 0
 Encode the message 1110 using this method

 You have received the message 0011101.

Find and correct the error in this message.
 Binary codes can be used to represent more
conventional information, but 4 digits only
gives us 16 possible messages
 That’s not even enough to represent the
alphabet!
 If we have n digits, then we can make 2n
different messages
 5 digits -> 32 messages
 6 digits -> 64 messages, etc.
 The idea we’re using is a specific example of a
parity check sum
 The parity of a number is either odd or even
 For example, digit V is 0 if I + II + III is even,
and odd if I + II + III is odd
 Instead of using Roman numerals, we’ll use a1
to represent the first digit of the message, a2
to represent the second digit, and so on
 We’ll use c1 to represent the first check digit,
c2 to represent the second, etc.
 Using this notation, our rules for our check
digits become
 c1 = 0 if a1 + a2 + a3 is even
 c1 = 1 if a1 + a2 + a3 is odd
 c2 = 0 if a1 + a3 + a4 is even
 c2 = 1 if a1 + a3 + a4 is odd
 c3 = 0 if a2 + a3 + a4 is even
 c3 = 1 if a2 + a3 + a4 is odd
 Under this new way of thinking about our
system, how do we decode messages?
 Simply compare the message with the list of
possible correct messages and pick the
“closest” one
 What should “closest” mean?
 If you have two messages of the same length,
the distance between the two messages is
the number of digits in which they differ
 What is the distance between 1100101 and
1010101?
 The messages differ in the 2nd and 3rd digits, so the
distance is 2

 What is the distance between 1110010 and

0001100?
 The messages differ in all but the 7th digit, so the
distance is 6
 The nearest neighbor decoding method
decodes a received message as the code word
that agrees with the message in the most
positions
 In this example, our messages are three digits
long: a1a2a3
 We have three check digits
 c1 = 0 if a1 + a2 + a3 is even
 c1 = 1 if a1 + a2 + a3 is odd
 c2 = 0 if a1 + a3 is even
 c2 = 1 if a1 + a3 is odd
 c3 = 0 if a2 + a3 is even
 c3 = 1 if a2 + a3 is odd
 Using these rules, we can find all of our code
words
 By analyzing this list, Message Code Word
we see that the smallest 000 000000

distance between two 001 001111

010 010101
code words is 3 011 011010
 That means we can use 100 100110
these code words to 101 101001
either detect two errors 110 110011

or correct one error 111 111100