Hamming, "Coding Theory - The Representation of Information, Part II" (April 20, 1995)
Channel: securitylectures
Date: 2012-08-26

Intro: Two things should be clear from the previous lecture. First, that we want the average length L of the message sent to be as small as we can make it (to save the use of facilities). Second, it must be a statistical theory since we cannot know the messages that are to be sent, but we can know some of the statistics by using past messages plus the inference that the future will probably be like the past. For the simplest theory, which is all we can discuss here, we will need the probabilities of the individual symbols occurring in a message. How to get these is not part of the theory, but can be obtained by the inspection of past experience, or imaginative guessing about the future use of the proposed system you are designing.



The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" was the capstone course by Dr. Richard W. Hamming (1915-1998) for graduate students at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey California. 

This course is intended to instill a "style of thinking" that will enhance one's ability to function as a problem solver of complex technical issues. With respect, students sometimes called the course "Hamming on Hamming" because he relates many research collaborations, discoveries, inventions and achievements of his own. This collection of stories and carefully distilled insights relates how those discoveries came about. Most importantly, these presentations provide objective analysis about the thought processes and reasoning that took place as Dr. Hamming, his associates and other major thinkers, in computer science and electronics, progressed through the grand challenges of science and engineering in the twentieth century.