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.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
That’s exactly what they said.
gozz@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Precisely… And digital modulation’s entire purpose is for a digital signal to survive those distortions bit-for-bit perfect. Even if we call the digitally-generated spectrogram digital information, the bird simply did not reproduce it exactly. Whatever time, frequency, and amplitude resolution you apply to the signal, if it’s low enough that the bird reproduced the signal exactly within that discretized scheme, then it simply did not achieve 2 MB/s.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If your argument is that the bandwidth calculation is incorrect, then sure I think that’s fair.
But I don’t think it’s correct to say it’s not a digital channel juts because it doesn’t have optimal bandwidth.
StellarExtract@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Gozz is correct. You’re misunderstanding the nature of a digital signal. What the author did was convert a digital signal to an analog signal, store that analog signal on a bird, then record that analog signal. Whether it was redigitized after the fact is irrelevant. It is not a digital process end-to-end. This is the same as if I were to download a YouTube video, record that video on a VHS tape, then redigitize that video. Not only would the end result not be a bit for bit match, it wouldn’t be a match at all despite containing some of the same visual information, because it would be the product of a digital-analog-digital conversion.
gozz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It isn’t a digital channel because it does not reproduce digital data. Unless it’s a one-bit signal of “does this look like a bird? yes/no”, but then the human making that assessment is part of the channel. To claim this is a digital system would require us to be so reductive as to redefine the meaning of the word.