Fibonacci coding

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In mathematics, Fibonacci coding is a universal code which encodes positive integers into binary code words. All tokens end with "11" and have no "11" before the end.

The formula used to generate Fibonacci codes is:

  1. N = \sum_{i=0}^k d(i) F(i)
  2. d(i) = 1 \Rightarrow d(i+1) = 0\,\!

where F(i) is the ith Fibonacci number. No two adjacent coefficients d(i) can be 1.

The code begins as follows:

Symbol Fibonacci representation Fibonacci code
1 F(1) 1 11
2 F(2) 2 011
3 F(3) 4 0011
4 F(1) + F(3) 5 1011
5 F(4) 8 00011
6 F(1) + F(4) 9 10011
7 F(2) + F(4) 10 01011
8 F(5) 16 000011

The Fibonacci code is closely related to Fibonacci representation, a positional numeral system sometimes used by mathematicians. The Fibonacci code for a particular integer is exactly that of the integer's Fibonacci representation, except with the order of its digits reversed and an additional "1" appended to the end.

To encode an integer X:

  1. Find the largest Fibonacci number equal to or less than X; subtract this number from X, keeping track of the remainder.
  2. If the number we subtracted was the Nth unique Fibonacci number, put a one in the Nth digit of our output.
  3. Repeat the previous steps, substituting our remainder for X, until we reach a remainder of 0.
  4. Place a one after the last naturally-occurring one in our output.

To decode a token in the code, remove the last "1", assign the remaining bits the values 1,2,3,5,8,13... (the Fibonacci numbers), and add the "1" bits.

[edit] Comparison with other universal codes

Fibonacci coding has a useful property that sometimes makes it attractive in comparison to other universal codes: it is easier to recover data from a damaged stream. With most other universal codes, if a single bit is altered, none of the data that comes after it will be correctly read. With Fibonacci coding, on the other hand, a changed bit may cause one token to be read as two, or cause two tokens to be read incorrectly as one, but reading a "0" from the stream will stop the errors from propagating further. Since the only stream that has no "0" in it is a stream of "11" tokens, the total edit distance between a stream damaged by a single bit error and the original stream is at most three.

This approach - encoding using sequence of symbols, in which some patterns (like "11") are forbidden, can be freely generalized[1].

[edit] See also

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