Basic Computer Questions

[neosway]

Can anyone help me with the following answers: Thank You.

 

1) An alien language is discovered which has only 17 characters in its alphabet. Not including upper case characters, digits, punctuation characters, or any other special characters, what is the minimum number of bits required to represent a single character of this alien alphabet?

 

2) A piece of music is 10 minutes long. The voltage level of the microphone is sampled at 10000 times per second . If there are 256 levels of voltage that can be stored, what is the minimum number of bytes in the file required to store this music?

[khaled]

1) An alien language is discovered which has only 17 characters in its alphabet. Not including upper case characters, digits, punctuation characters, or any other special characters, what is the minimum number of bits required to represent a single character of this alien alphabet?

 

-- You can represent a variable of [math]2^{\alpha}[/math] possible values, using only [math]\alpha[/math] bits, where every bit has two possible values (0,1) ...

 

2) A piece of music is 10 minutes long. The voltage level of the microphone is sampled at 10000 times per second . If there are 256 levels of voltage that can be stored, what is the minimum number of bytes in the file required to store this music?

 

-- 10 minutes = 600 seconds, 10,000 samples/second = 6,000,000 samples total, 256 possible values = [math]2^8[/math] ~ 1 Byte/Sample,

 

Minimum Storage = 1 Byte * 6,000,000 samples = 6,000,000 Bytes ~ 5.72 MB (Mega Bytes)

Edited September 27, 2011 by khaled

[neosway]

Thank you Khaled, that actually makes sense and helps alot.

I did work on the alien question but was getting a number that I wasn't so sure about. Sounds better now. Thx again.

 

 

 

-- You can represent a variable of [math]2^{\alpha}[/math] possible values, using only [math]\alpha[/math] bits, where every bit has two possible values (0,1) ...

 

 

 

-- 10 minutes = 600 seconds, 10,000 samples/second = 6,000,000 samples total, 256 possible values = [math]2^8[/math] ~ 1 Byte/Sample,

 

Minimum Storage = 1 Byte * 6,000,000 samples = 6,000,000 Bytes ~ 5.72 MB (Mega Bytes)