Random thoughts

Motivation

While I was attending a lecture in the digital communications course, our teacher was explaining signal quantization. Basically, after you sample the analog signal, you need to map values to a finite set of values. For example, a value of 1.39 would be mapped to 1.375. This set of finite values would then be decoded and sent.

One colleague asked, but wouldn’t this approximation make us lose valuable information? The teacher replied with a simple question: how old are you? Surprised, our colleague said 20 years old. Are you exactly 20 years old? Aren’t you 20 years old and a couple of months, days, and hours? We all use approximation in our daily lives more than you think, because this still keeps the information we need, came the reply from our teacher.

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Motivation

While I was attending a lecture in the digital communications course, our teacher was explaining signal quantization. Basically, after you sample the analog signal, you need to map values to a finite set of values. For example, a value of 1.39 would be mapped to 1.375. This set of finite values would then be decoded and sent.

One colleague asked, but wouldn’t this approximation make us lose valuable information? The teacher replied with a simple question: how old are you? Surprised, our colleague said 20 years old. Are you exactly 20 years old? Aren’t you 20 years old and a couple of months, days, and hours? We all use approximation in our daily lives more than you think, because this still keeps the information we need, came the reply from our teacher.

Read more →