To understand its space efficiency, it is instructive to compare the general Bloom filter with its special case when  = 1. If = 1, then in order to keep the false positive rate sufficiently low, a small fraction of bits should be set, which means the array must be very large and contain long runs of zeros. The information content of the array relative to its size is low. The generalized Bloom filter ( greater than 1) allows many more bits to be set while still maintaining a low false positive rate; if the parameters ( and ) are chosen well, about half of the bits will be set, and these will be apparently random, minimizing redundancy and maximizing information content.