e codeword precedes or follows. The detection of a new symbol is also an indication that blanks are now being coded! But we now have a tax to pay: the minimum symbol size of this new Morse code is 7 (digram symbols "E-blank" and "T-blank"), and the maximum size is 13 (digram symbol "error-blank"). We shall therefore discard this effective, but poorly economical approach. The second possibility is to convert the pseudo-binary Morse code into a ternary one. In base three, the characters are 0, 1, and 2, which are called trits for ternary digits). 12 A single trit, thus, codes three numbers, and n trits make up 3n coding possibilities. Our extended Morse code having 49 +1= 50 symbols, we see that n = 4 trits are required, although 34 = 81 is far in excess of what we actually need. Here, we shall not attempt to optimize the length of this ternary coding system, but only to use the property offered by a third alphabet character to represent blanks uniquely. Setting the convention da = 0, dit = 1, we can only have blank = 2. The ternary codeword is simply generated by appending 2 at the end of the binary Morse codeword. The first two columns in Table 8.3 show the ternary codeword correspondence with the A-Z letters of the Morse code. For instance R = becomes 1012 in the proposed ternary representation. Actually, this alternative Morse code is not different from the conventional one, if one conceives of 11 To my knowledge, the following (including in the next section) constitutes an original information-theory analysis of the Morse code. Likewise, in the base-4 or quaternary system, the characters 0, 1, 2, and 3 are called quads. 8.3 The Morse code Table 8.3 Ternary representation of the Morse-code letters into trit codewords (CW), with the introduction of a character, 2, to signal the blank immediately following conventional Morse symbols (o = 1, - = 0, blank = 2), as shown in the first two columns. Column 3 shows the source probability distribution p(x), which is the same as used in Fig. 4.5 for English-language refer