News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on How to Store Data on Paper?. Parent comment

Re:How to Store Data on Paper? by LgWoodenBadger on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @06:53AM (#44168540)
2 dots at 5 possibilities each gives 25 (5^2)

2 dots at 2 possibilities each gives 4 (2^2)

They only diverge from there. Or am I doing my math wrong?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How to Store Data on Paper? by CorrectHorseBat on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @08:26AM (#44169242)
Information is ~log(possible states) according to Shannon.

Log(25)/log(4) is 2.3. Among other things this definition has the nice property that two disks/pages/drives/bits together contain the sum of the capacities instead of their product.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How to Store Data on Paper? by baobun on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @12:18PM (#44171675)
To expand if it helps intuition: As data data density grows, the largest representable number grows exponentially.
[ Parent | on HN ]