I don't know if Raht is following this thread any more,but I might be
able to shed some light on this inference.

First, any time you deal with bits, and can start grouping them in a
fashion that lets you represent an octet (0-7), its fairly natural (at
least to me) to at least give it a try and see if can make inferences
about the result. Furthering that theory is the fact that the message
was 75 bits in length, which is evenly divisible by three. Its not to
say there's a hard rule that says it "has" to be in three bits, but it
was a logical place to start looking.

Yes, five bits can provide a symbol for every letter, but in
applications where bandwidth is at a premium, there's almost always an
effort to compress the data being transmitted. If every symbols is 5
bits, your average symbol length is 5 bits; if you use shorter codes
to represent frequent letters, you can decrease that average symbol
length and save bandwidth. That means use the fewest number of bits to
represent the most frequent letters, with frequency determined by some
sort of table. You can represent 6 symbols in three bits, reserving
two as prefixes for longer codes.

Once the clues started matching up with this idea, interpreting the
data as Raht did started revealing some interesting patterns that were
confirmed by later clues. No need to go further into that here, as
some may still be working on the code, but perhaps that explains a bit
why you wouldn't necessarily assume a 5-bit code...

-David








(Pierre) wrote in message . com...
(raht) wrote in message om...

Let me see if I can help a little?

take a line from the example

---ll---lll--l-----llll-llll------lll-lll-lllll-ll-ll-llll--ll---lll----l-ll--,

now break it into 3's (it's 3 bit binary)
--- ll- --l ll- -l- --- -ll ll- lll l-- --- -ll l-l ll- lll ll- ll-
ll- lll l-- ll- --l ll- --- l-l l--,

the - = 0
and l = 1


Interesting approach, raht. But just how did you figure out it was
3-bit binary in the first place? At first glance, since 3 bits allows
only for 8 possibilities, you'd need at least 5 bits to represent all
26 letters of the alphabet. So, at this point, why not 6 bits instead
of 3?

P.