RWE072605

Replication w/ Error Study Group

Notes from July 26, 2005 meeting

1. DE introduced problem from engineering perspective & provided naive mapping into information theory (i.e., parents = sender, offspring = receiver, machine design = message, replication process = channel, and so on).
2. TK provided a tutorial on parity
   1. idea of adding a parity bit to a message
   2. idea of Hamming codes & logarythmic encoding
   3. idea of feedforward correction (information sent to enable both message checking and correcting)
   4. idea of feedback correction (only information needed for error detection sent with message, but channel in place for receiver to request a resend if needed)
      1. discussion of tradeoffs between feedforward and feedback correction
3. more discussion of possible framework (see figure below)