Exactly. Digital logic, when implemented in analogue, generally have to have forbidden zones where a signal in that range is considerer invalid. Regardless of implementation, digital is about the discretized logic of the system. That is explicitly the whole point of digital: Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.
The point with digital transfers is that you round it back to either 0 or 1, hoping that no bits are distorted enough to have any loss at all.
gozz@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.
This isn’t true in the general case. In the real world, you can have all kinds of distortions: random noise, time shifts, interference from other signals, etc.
You don’t usually see the effects of these because the protocols are designed with the communication channel characteristics in mind in order to reproduce the original signal.
Using birds is just another communication channel with its own distortion characteristics.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I dunno how you’d use check digits with a bird, but this seems the obvious way to deal with corruption. Or maybe give the bird more treats.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
That’s not really how it works in the real world. Usually you have both bandwidth and noise constraints.
Sure you can send something like a square wave but this isn’t practical for real communication channels. Typically you’re sending many sine waves in parallel with multiple amplitudes and phase offsets to represent a sequence of bits (QAM). Then on top of that you’d encode the original data with both a randomizer (to prevent long runs from looking like nothing) and error correction. So usually the system can handle some level of distortion.
What you’re hoping is that by the time the data reaches the user (really, Layer 3), all the errors have already been handled and you never see any issues.
The bird is just another type of noisy channel with its own distortion characteristics.