rpw3@fortune.UUCP (01/16/84)
#R:stolaf:-129000:fortune:6200003:000:994
fortune!rpw3 Jan 15 20:49:00 1984
The January 1984 issue of Scientific American (with the straw hat and
the rice paddy on the front) has an excellent article (pp. 116-125) called
"The Packing Of Spheres" by N. J. A. Sloane. Sloane is said to work at Bell
Laboratories, but no further address is given.
The article covers the issue of space remaining between spheres in any
dimension of packing. The aspect I found intriguing was the application
of the sphere-packing problem to the design of energy-efficient data coding
schemes (e.g., for modems) where each sphere is a legal codeword in N-space.
N is the number of orthogonal physical properties you are coding (amplitude,
phase, etc.) times the number of baud/symbol.
To someone like me who doesn't know the field, it seems to be a very good
survey/tutorial. There are many references to previous work.
Rob Warnock
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