The birthday problem and zero-error list codes

Abstract

As an attempt to bridge the gap between classical information theory and the combinatorial world of zero-error information theory, this paper studies the performance of randomly generated codebooks over discrete memoryless channels under a zero-error constraint. This study allows the application of tools from one area to the other. Furthermore, it leads to an information-theoretic formulation of the birthday problem, which is concerned with the probability that in a given population, a fixed number of people have the same birthday. Due to the lack of a closed-form expression for this probability when the distribution of birthdays is not uniform, the resulting computation is not feasible in some applications; the information-theoretic formulation, however, can be analyzed for all distributions.

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