What are these bits that we're talking about?
And the bit is really the basic unit of information
that's used in modern communication systems.
It's some kind of variable that can assume one of two possible values.
Normally we'll call those two values zero or one, but that's really arbitrary.
Intuitively, what you can think of a bit as being,
is as the answer to a yes or no question.
So more complicated information can be then sent not using this one bit,
but multiple bits which we're going to send as sequences of waveforms.
And so, if we can think about just a single bit now,
we can think about, well, what are the different ways that we could represent
that using the transmitter as a physical signal that could then
be sent over some kind of communication medium?
And so this is the board that we use in the physical version of the lab,
and you'll be using some kind of online analog of this board.
In this board here, what we use is we use light to transmit information.
But that's only one possible example.
So for example, we could use-- if we are transmitting information
over a wire-- we could use something like voltage or current.
And we could use two different values of the voltage, for example high or low,
to represent the two values of one and zero.
In this board here what we're looking at is we're using light.
And down here is the transmitter.
And so the transmitter actually consists of these,
what we call light-emitting diodes, you can think of them
kind of being like light bulbs.
And what we're going to do is if we want to send a one,
then we would turn the light on.
And if you want to send a zero, we would turn the light off.
Now there are many, many other ways that we could send information.
For example, any kind of physical kind of variable could send ones and zeros.
And so for example, one thing I could do is
use my hand and the position of my hand to send information.
So for example if I wanted to send a zero-bit, what I could do
is I could hold my hand down here low.
And then when I wanted to send a one-bit, I
could then raise the position of my hand.
And this would then indicate a one.
And so this is often what we do, for example, in class.
Most of the time, the students are sitting in the class.
They don't have any questions, so their hands are usually down.
But when they have a question, what they might do is to raise their hands.
And that would indicate to me that there's a question in the classroom.
And that's kind of, again, the answer to a yes or no question--
that students are constantly answering the question,
do you have a question or not, by holding their hands down,
indicating no.
But when they do have a question, they would raise their hands, indicating yes.
Now when we send more complicated information, what we do
is we usually use sequences of bits.
And we'll talk about that a little bit later.
But we need to send that information using a time-based representation,
where what we do is we hold the physical variable
constant for a certain amount of time.
And if we want to send a bit sequence.
For example, 1 0 1 0 and so on, what we would do
is we would change the value of the physical variable over time.
And so if we were looking at the example of my hand, what we would do
is I would start out with my hand high, indicating a one.
I would hold it constant for a certain amount of time, called the bit time,
and then I would change it after that time to encode the next bit.
And so in this case here, what I would do is I would start my hand out high.
And I would go high, low, high, low, high and then low.
And over that amount of time, I've just transmitted this bit sequence, 1, 0, 1,
0, 0 and so on.
Of course, what we'd like to be able to do,
is we'd like to be able to send information as quickly as possible.
And so in order to do that, what we try to do then
is take this bit time that we're using to send one bit,
and try to make that as short as possible.
So we take this bit time and try to make it shorter.
And in this case, what I've done is I've cut that bit time in half.
And what that then allows me to do is send twice as much information
in the same amount of time.
And so you can see, in this case here, what I have
is this exact same bit sequence as you see up here.
But now, it's taken half the amount of time.
So I can send additional information.
And that's going to put some kind of strain on the communication system,
because you can imagine if I was using my hand,
I would start it out here as being high.
And if I wanted to use the same time encoding,
I would have to move my hand faster.
So high, low, high, low, high, low, high, low, high, low, high.
So that was a little bit more difficult for me to do.
And just like it's difficult for me to communicate information more quickly,
it's difficult for electronic communication systems
to communicate information more quickly.
And so in this class, what we'd like to be able to do
is really understand what those limitations are
and how we can deal with those limitations,
so that we can really get the fastest information transmission as possible.
So what are the limitations, then, that are introduced
in trying to transmit those that kind of information as quickly as possible.
Those kind of limitations are really introduced by what we called the channel.
So you remember what the transmitter does is it takes that bit sequence,
and it kind of represents it as state changes over time
in a physical variable.
Now what's going to happen then is that those kind of state changes
are going to then have to be transmitted from some location
to a remote location over what's called the channel.
And the process of this physical variable being transformed over
that channel is going to cause a distortion,
so that what's received at the other end is not
going to be quite the same as what was sent over here.
And so for example, if we think about the physical example
that I talked about before, with using my hand,
we can kind of think about the transmitter perhaps as being my brain.
And I want to encode this bit sequence.