Binary erasure channel erasure channel which shares many similar theoretical results with the binary erasure channel. The BEC is a "binary channel"; that is, it can transmit only one of two symbols (usually called 0 and 1). (A non-binary channel would be capable of transmitting more than two symbols, possibly even an infinite number of choices.) The channel is not perfect and sometimes the bit gets "erased"; that is, the bit gets scrambled so the receiver has no idea what the bit was. The BEC is, in a sense, error-free. Unlike the binary symmetric channel, when the receiver gets a bit, it is
Binary logarithm and ISO 80000-2), and (with a prior statement that the default base is 2) . Historically, the first application of binary logarithms was in music theory, by Leonhard Euler: the binary logarithm of a frequency ratio of two musical tones gives the number of octaves by which the tones differ. Binary logarithms can be used to calculate the length of the representation of a number in the binary numeral system, or the number of bits needed to encode a message in information theory. In computer science, they count the number of steps needed for binary search and related algorithms. Other