Other Spaces
Sphere packing on the corners of a hypercube (with the spheres defined by Hamming distance) corresponds to designing error-correcting codes: if the spheres have radius d, then their centers are codewords of a d-error-correcting code. Lattice packings correspond to linear codes. There are other, subtler relationships between Euclidean sphere packing and error-correcting codes. For example, the binary Golay code is closely related to the 24-dimensional Leech lattice.
Read more about this topic: Sphere Packing
Famous quotes containing the word spaces:
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.””
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there. For there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)