Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of Mechanical Engineering 6.050J/2.110J – Information, Entropy and Computation – Spring 2017

Unit 4: Errors

Schedule (2 weeks)

Lecture Handouts

Students who for any reason did not receive these items can pick them up in Room 38-344. Most of this material is also available on the 6.050J/2.110J Web site http://mtlsites.mit.edu/Courses/6.050.

• Unit 4 Resources (this page)
• 6.050J/2.110J Notes
  • Chapter 4: Errors
• Error Correction with Hamming Codes
• CD-ROM Technical Summary, by Andy Poggio; March, 1988

Reading Assignment

• Notes, Chapter 4: Errors
• Error Correction with Hamming Codes

Resources

Technical

• Richard W. Hamming, “Coding and Information Theory,” Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632, 259 pp.; Second Edition 1986.
• Examples of error detection without correction
  • CRC, Cyclic Redundancy Check
  • ISBN, International Standard Book Number . . manual . . programming tools
  • ISSN, International Standard Serial Number . . (should blogs get ISSNs? One opinion)
• Error Correcting Codes links
• Quantum ECC

Historical

• Richard W. Hamming (1915–1998)
• Coding Theory popular article, “Coding theory: the first 50 years” by Richard Pinch
• Reed Solomon codes, introductory article, “The Ubiquitous Reed-Solomon Codes” by Barry A. Cipra

General Technical Books

There are many excellent texts on coding theory and communications, some of which assume a familiarity with mathematics beyond introductory calculus.

• John G. Truxal, “The Age of Electronic Messages,” McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, New York, NY; 1990. Aimed at providing technology and engineering exposure to liberal arts students. Nonmathematical, with lots of great examples. Based on material taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
• John R. Pierce, “An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise,” Dover Publications, Inc., New York, NY; 1961, 1980 (Second Edition). Mostly nonmathematical, by one of the nation’s great scientific contributors at AT&T Bell Laboratories, who was also interested in reaching a general audience. He was later on the faculty at Caltech. One of his interesting sideline activities was writing science fiction stories under the pen name J. J. Coupling. He died April 2, 2002 at the age of 92.
• Robert G. Gallager, “Information Theory and Reliable Communications,” John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY; 1968. One of the early textbooks, designed for first-year graduate students, by one of the pioneers in communications, an MIT faculty member, later awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor, its most prestigious award.
• Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas, “Elements of Information Theory,” John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY; 1991. Aimed at university seniors and first-year graduate students. One of several excellent books of that era. Professor Cover, at Stanford University, is one of the world leaders in Information Theory.

Help Wanted

6.050J/2.110J students: be the first to suggest a resource, for example a useful Web site or a good book or article, to add to the list above. Send your suggestion by e-mail during Spring 2017 to 6.050-staff at mit.edu.