Talk:Fountain code

Fountain code received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

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Regarding the practical considerations:

I am currently working on my implementation of Online Codes for Ruby (http://rubyforge.org/projects/archipelago/ contains a gem for that), and I am actually achieving an average overhead of about 8-10% for 2000 packets.

I admit that the speed of my implementation is far from good enough at the moment, but the data overhead is quite alright. Does anyone care to comment?

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Sorry, but this is totally jargon-filled article. It is not suitable for an encyclopedia, but more for a specialized journal. I am an IT guy with tewnty years of experience and I cannot really understand the article (and I really want to!). I mean stuff like: "if and only if the BP algorithm over a check matrix H (or triangularization of a check matrix H) can recover most of input symbols." Oy!! Whut??

I understand that this is a complex subject, but please see if you can define many of the terms, or at least hyperlink them to where they might be understood by us amateurs. Rchakrav 16:58, 28 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the complaint for being too technical

The article explains quite well the basic properties of a Fountain code, including applications. There are not any technical or mathematical descriptions at all in the current state of the article. And I don't think it well help at all over-trivializing a topic; it just requires a bit of background knowledge to truly understand - and for this the article provides both external and internal references. But then, the OP was probably just trolling... Nageh (talk) 10:48, 14 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to prefix this by saying that if I'm completely off-base here, I apologize. I don't mean to sound aggressive, and I'm pretty new to Wikipedia editing. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I tried making this article a bit easier to understand, without sacrificing much accuracy (The last few edits, while not logged in). In my opinion, the current state of the article is pretty bad. I'll give some specific gripes:

"Fountain codes are flexibly applicable at a fixed code rate, or where a fixed code rate cannot be determined a priori, and where efficient encoding and decoding of large amounts of data is required."

This sentence uses some dense language to say very little. I'd translate it to something like "Fountain codes can be used with a fixed code rate, or one determined on the fly. Encoding and decoding are both fast enough to handle large workloads.". The sentence adds no substance to the article, though, so I'd remove it.

(The first example in Applications)

I tried to come up with a good example to illustrates where this type of encoding scheme would be well-suited, and I think I did a good job. The passive receiver / broadcasting transmitter example can illustrate both the advantages of fountain codes in a multicast scenario, and the advantages of fountain codes over a lossy wireless connection. The data carousel example is not very concrete, and needs to reference another article (data carousel) to be understood. The referenced article is also fairly low-quality (and has been tagged as such since 2007).

"[...]are a class of erasure codes with the property that a potentially limitless sequence of encoding symbols can be generated from a given set of source symbols such that the original source symbols can ideally be recovered from any subset of the encoding symbols of size equal to or only slightly larger than the number of source symbols."

I find this opening sentence pretty hard to parse. I need to leave, though, so I'll stop here. Thanks!

--Meyermagic (talk) 02:53, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]