Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
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Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
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Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#2In 1993, two unknown French engineers claimed to have found a coding scheme to provide virtually error-free communications at data rates and transmitting-power efficiencies well beyond what most experts thought possible. Nobody believed them and set out to find the error in their paper... There was no error.
Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#330 years ago? What took so long for broad adoption? Patents?
edit
Article doesn't elaborate on why that might be, but it does note:
"an alternative that has been given a new lease on life is low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, invented in the early 1960s by Robert Gallager at MIT but largely forgotten since then...Now researchers have implemented LDPC codes so that they actually outperform turbo codes and get even closer to the Shannon limit...Another advantage, perhaps the biggest of all, is that the LDPC patents have expired, so companies can use them without having to pay for intellectual-property rights."
Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#4Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#530 years ago? What took so long for broad adoption? Patents? edit Article doesn't elaborate on why that might be, but it does note: "an alternative that has been given a new lease on life is low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, invented in the early 1960s by Robert Gallager at MIT but largely forgotten since then...Now researchers have implemented LDPC codes so that they actually outperform turbo codes and get even…
Unfortunately, one of the common scenarios when it comes to percolating results from academia to industry is the following:
1. Academics make discovery/invent something.
2. Academics attempt to convince industry to adopt discovery.
3. Discovery is laughed out of industry as "impractical", "academic", etc.
4. Academics teach discovery to their students.
5. Students get into industry.
6. Students get into position of tech leads, architects, etc.
7. Students demonstrate the use of discovery.
(by then, 30 years have elapsed)
e.g. garbage collectors, type systems, threads, distributed systems, message passing concurrency, actors, JITs, metacompilation, machine learning, functional programming...
Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#6The article is from 2004.
Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#730 years ago? What took so long for broad adoption? Patents? edit Article doesn't elaborate on why that might be, but it does note: "an alternative that has been given a new lease on life is low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, invented in the early 1960s by Robert Gallager at MIT but largely forgotten since then...Now researchers have implemented LDPC codes so that they actually outperform turbo codes and get even…
Not an expert, but I've encountered Reed Solomon error correction extensively in my career, and this seems to be replacing RS applications? I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fair amount of inertia to overcome given how widely used and how well RS worked for a very long time. RS was critical for things like ADSL data transmission over POTS and other similar large scale applications.
The wikipedia page for RS suggests some RS implementations are now "being replaced by more powerful turbo codes".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_cor...
Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#830 years ago? What took so long for broad adoption? Patents? edit Article doesn't elaborate on why that might be, but it does note: "an alternative that has been given a new lease on life is low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, invented in the early 1960s by Robert Gallager at MIT but largely forgotten since then...Now researchers have implemented LDPC codes so that they actually outperform turbo codes and get even…
Unfortunately, one of the common scenarios when it comes to percolating results from academia to industry is the following: 1. Academics make discovery/invent something. 2. Academics attempt to convince industry to adopt discovery. 3. Discovery is laughed out of industry as "impractical", "academic", etc. 4. Academics teach discovery to their students. 5. Students get into industry. 6. Students get into position of t…
> 3. Discovery is laughed out of industry as "impractical", "academic", etc.
To be fair, sometimes academic inventions are impractical given the technical landscape du jour. They only become feasible as technology and society progresses, say 30 years.
Also, your observation does not mean any invention is meaningful (and will eventually be recognized as such). I for one, learned a bunch of "impractical", "academic" nonsense too in university.
But yes, I think as a whole, your 7 points observation as a whole is very much at play in the Turbo Codes case. Yes.
Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#930 years ago? What took so long for broad adoption? Patents? edit Article doesn't elaborate on why that might be, but it does note: "an alternative that has been given a new lease on life is low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, invented in the early 1960s by Robert Gallager at MIT but largely forgotten since then...Now researchers have implemented LDPC codes so that they actually outperform turbo codes and get even…
Unfortunately, one of the common scenarios when it comes to percolating results from academia to industry is the following: 1. Academics make discovery/invent something. 2. Academics attempt to convince industry to adopt discovery. 3. Discovery is laughed out of industry as "impractical", "academic", etc. 4. Academics teach discovery to their students. 5. Students get into industry. 6. Students get into position of t…
0. Science Advances One Funeral at a Time
Re: Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
#1030 years ago? What took so long for broad adoption? Patents? edit Article doesn't elaborate on why that might be, but it does note: "an alternative that has been given a new lease on life is low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, invented in the early 1960s by Robert Gallager at MIT but largely forgotten since then...Now researchers have implemented LDPC codes so that they actually outperform turbo codes and get even…
Note that the article is almost 20 years old, so it is more like 10 years for industry adoption.