Information theory course: Message 1

Hello everyone!
There is a webpage identical to this email message here: http://www.aims.ac.za/~mackay/handwritten/2005.1.html
In September 2005, some of you suggested that I should tell you before each class what the topic of the class is going to be, so that you can read about the topic before the lecture. So this message is to let you know about the first few classes on information theory.

The textbook for this course is Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms. There are five copies of the book in the library, and the book is available at http://www.aims.ac.za/~mackay/itila/. south africa

AIMS Students wishing to view the book directly without using a web-browser can use ghostview or xpdf: 

    gv ~mackay/public_html/itprnn/book.ps.gz  
    xpdf ~mackay/public_html/itprnn/book.pdf 

Optional advance reading

If you would like to read the material we will be covering during the first three days (for example, if you have any difficulty with English), please read:

The main topics I plan for the next three weeks are
"Noisy channel coding" (reliable communication over unreliable channels); and
"Source coding" (data compression). [Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6, & 14.]