The big picture: Coding theory in its broadest sense deals with
techinques for the efficient, secure, and reliable
transmission of data over channels that may be subject to non-malicious
errors and adversarial intrusion.
The main tools used are data compression, cryptography, and error
correcting codes.
Lecture 2: (Jan 6)
Basic definitions and concepts
Communications model.
Basic definitions (alphabet, word, code, block code).
q-symmetric channels, binary symmetric channels, symbol error
probability.
Information rate and distance of a (block) code.
Lecture 3: (Jan 8)
Decoding strategies
Incomplete Maximum Likelihood Decoding (IMLD).
Complete Maximum Likelihood Decoding (CMLD).
Minimum Error probability Decoding (MED) - the optimal decoding strategy.
IMLD is, in general, not the same as MED.
IMLD is the same as MED if all source messages are equally likely.