URSI National Committee Report: Commission 6. Radio Waves and Circuits. Part 1. Information Theory and Coding

Abstract

Since 1957, there has been considerable progress i n the theo ry of coding messages for transmission over noisy channels. There have been three main directions of advance. First, there has been work on the foundation s of the theory. During this time American mathematicians interested in probability have shown a serious interest in informat ion theory, since Feinstein's work (now available in book form) [Feinstein, 1958al and since the interest shown by Kolmogorov and Khinchin. Second, a great deal of work has been done on error-correcting block codes for noisy binary channels. This work has involved a good deal of modern a lgebra, and so me mathematical algebraists have been joining the communications research workers in attacking these problems. T h ird , there has been cont inu ing investigation of procedures in which input messages are coded and decoded sequ entially rather t han in long blocks. This work and the work on binar y block codes both have significant practical implications for electrical communications.