• takeda@szmer.info
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    1 year ago

    Edit 2: According to Randall Munroe (to lazy to find the source), you could theoretically store one word letter per bit. That would give us up to ten two million books.

    I don’t see how that is possible, I think it is be one letter per byte.

    Bit only represents one state 1 or 0, or true or false. It is too little information to store a letter.

    • Masimatutu@lemm.eeOP
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      1 year ago

      Here ya go:

      Based on the rates of correct guesses—and rigorous mathematical analysis—Shannon determined that the information content of typical written English was around 1.0 to 1.2 bits per letter.

      https://what-if.xkcd.com/34/

    • Doctor xNo@r.nf
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      1 year ago

      That’s bit, a letter or character is a byte (8 bits), this is about right for pure text files that have no overhead, any extra info (like font, size, type, anything except which chatacter…) Is extra bytes, of course.

      • jaybone@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If we’re only talking 26 letters no caps, we can cut that down to 5 bits. Then use a decent compression algorithm. Someone more bored than I am can do the math.

        • Masimatutu@lemm.eeOP
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          1 year ago

          five bits would only leaves us with six punctuation marks (including spaces, and we don’t get any numerals either) though, do you think that’s enough? i certainly don’t; i have not even used a full stop and I have already exceeded it!