39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code
Guessing there's something very fundamental that the author misunderstands about Morse code.
Guessing there's something very fundamental that the author misunderstands about Morse code.
Of course, if you know both ends are computers you can just transmit in some other encoding at a much higher rate.
Yes, spaces are part of the morse code spec. It looks like a binary encoding but in fact it's ternary.
We can invent a 5-bit (or 6-bit, to include numbers and punctuation) morse-like code to avoid needing spaces.
Historically the metric for Morse code is words per minute. Morse is similar to a Huffman code where common letters are allocated fewer elements, so it's not very meaningful to talk about "bits per second" with respect to Morse even if you do specify the number of words per minute. The number of "bits" will vary based on the letters being transmitted.
A skilled operator is around 30 WPM. The average English word is 5 (rounded up) characters. Add one character for the space. That's 180 characters per minute, or 3 character per second. With 37 characters available in morse code, that's log_2(37) or 5.2 bits per charater.
So 15.6 bits per second. Just under half of the 39 bits they got for speech, like they said.
That wasn't contested.
The faster the information comes at you, the less important any particular bit is, because you have more context with which to autocorrect.