Monday, March 5, 2007

A book on a metre stick

Here is one of the solutions of the above problem. The problem is that we have to encode some large amount of information on a stick of one metre size using only one mark on the stick.

Let's see how we can do it. There are 26 letters from A to Z, 10 numbers, many special characters. Assign a two digit number to each of the letters, numerals, 'space' and special characters. (As they do in ASCII. Or else use a three digit number instead of two)

Now for the entire text we have a series of numbers and putting them together we get a very large number (say b). Now put a mark on the stick such that it divides the stick into the ratio a/b, where 'a' is a pre-decided number (say 10^1000000) and b is the large number we have got.

Now if have an infinite degree of precision in reading, we can always retrieve that text again!

Of course, some of the assumptions are highly chimerical - but anyways it was just a thought exercise !

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