What is the power of the alphabet? How to find the power of the alphabet: formula

Modern computer technology, computer science, the power of the alphabet, the system of calculus and many other concepts have the most direct connections between each other. Very few users today are sufficiently versed in these issues. Let's try to clarify what the power of the alphabet is, how to calculate it and apply it in practice. In the future, this, no doubt, can be useful in practice.

How information is measured

Before we begin to study the question of what the power of the alphabet is, and what it is, it is necessary to begin, so to speak, with the basics.

Surely everyone knows that today there are special systems for measuring any quantities, based on reference values. For example, for distances and similar quantities, these are meters, for weight and weight - kilograms, for time intervals - seconds, etc.

But how do you measure information in terms of the volume of the text? It was for this purpose that the concept of the power of the alphabet was introduced.

What is the power of the alphabet: the initial concept

So, if we follow the generally accepted rule that the final value of any value is a parameter that determines how many times the reference unit is laid down in the measured quantity, we can conclude: the power of the alphabet is the total number of symbols used for a particular language.

To make it clearer, let's leave the question of how to find the power of the alphabet, aside, and pay attention to the symbols themselves, naturally, from the point of view of information technology. Roughly speaking, a complete list of used symbols contains letters, numbers, all kinds of brackets, special characters, punctuation marks, etc. However, if you approach the question of what is the power of the alphabet in a computer way, you should also include a blank (a single gap between words or other symbols).

Take, for example, the Russian language, or rather, the keyboard layout. Based on the foregoing, the complete list contains 33 letters, 10 digits and 11 special characters. Thus, the total power of the alphabet is 54.

Information weight of symbols

However, the general concept of the power of the alphabet does not define the essence of computing information volumes of text containing letters, numbers and symbols. This requires a special approach.

Basically, think about it, well, how can there be a minimum set in terms of a computer system, how many characters can it contain? Answer: two. And that's why. The fact is that every symbol, whether it's a letter or a digit, has its own information weight, according to which the machine recognizes what is in front of it. But the computer understands only the representation in the form of units and zeros, on which, actually, all computer science is based.

Thus, any symbol can be represented in the form of sequences containing the digits 1 and 0, that is, the minimum sequence denoting a letter, number or symbol, consists of two components.

The information weight itself, taken as a standard information unit of measurement, is called a bit (1 bit). Accordingly, 8 bits are 1 byte.

Character representation in binary code

So, what is the power of the alphabet, I think, is already a little clear. Now let's look at another aspect, in particular, a practical representation of power using binary code. As an example for simplicity, let us take an alphabet containing only 4 symbols.

In a two-digit binary code, the sequence and their information representation can be described as follows:

Hence - the simplest conclusion: with the power of the alphabet N = 4, the weight of the unit symbol is 2 bits.

If you use a three-digit binary code for an alphabet, for example, with 8 characters, the number of combinations will be as follows:

In other words, with the power of the alphabet N = 8, the weight of one symbol for a three-digit binary code will be 3 bits.

How to find the power of the alphabet and use it in computer expression

Now let's look at the dependency expressed by the number of characters in the code and the power of the alphabet. The formula, where N is the alphabetical power of the alphabet, and b is the number of characters in the binary code, will look like this:

N = 2 ^b

That is, 2 ¹ = 2, 2 ² = 4, 2 ³ = 8, 2 ⁴ = 16, and so on. Roughly speaking, the required number of characters of the binary code itself is the weight of the symbol. In information terms, it looks like this:

Measuring the information volume

However, these were just the simplest examples, so to speak, for an initial understanding of what the power of the alphabet is. Let us pass directly to practice.

At this stage of development of computer technology for typing, taking into account uppercase, uppercase and lowercase letters, Cyrillic and Latin characters, punctuation marks, brackets, signs of arithmetic operations, etc. 256 characters are used. Proceeding from the fact that 256 is 2 ⁸ , it is not difficult to guess that the weight of each symbol in this alphabet is 8, that is, 8 bits or 1 byte.

If you start from all known parameters, you can easily get the desired value of the information volume of any text. For example, we have a computer text containing 30 pages. On one page there are 50 lines of 60 any signs or symbols, including spaces.

Thus, one page will contain 50 x 60 = 3 000 bytes of information, and the entire text - 3000 x 50 = 150 000 bytes. As you can see, even small texts can not be measured in bytes. And what about whole libraries?

In this case, it is better to translate the volume into more powerful quantities - kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc. Based on the fact that, for example, 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2 ¹⁰ ), and megabytes are 2 ¹⁰ kilobytes (1024 kilobytes), it's easy to calculate that the amount of text in the information-mathematical expression for our example will be 150000/1024 = 146, 484375 kilobytes or about 0.14305 megabytes.

Instead of the

In general, this is briefly and all that concerns the consideration of the question, what is the power of the alphabet. It remains to add that in this description a purely mathematical approach was used. It goes without saying that the semantic load of the text in this case is not taken into account.

But if you approach the issues of consideration precisely from a position that gives a person something for comprehension, a set of meaningless combination or sequences of symbols in this plan will have a zero information load, although from the point of view of the notion of the information volume, the result can still be calculated.

In general, knowledge of the power of the alphabet and related concepts are not so difficult to understand and can be applied elementary in the sense of practical actions. At the same time, every user faces this almost every day. It is enough to cite as an example a popular Word editor or any other similar level in which such a system is used. But do not confuse it with the usual "Notepad". Here the power of the alphabet is lower, because, for example, uppercase letters are not used when typing.