What is the power of the alphabet? How to find the power of the alphabet: formula

Modern computer technology, computer science, the power of the alphabet, calculus systems and many other concepts have the most direct connections between themselves. Very few users today are well versed in these issues. Let's try to clarify what the power of the alphabet is, how to calculate and apply it in practice. In the future, this, without a doubt, can be useful in practice.

How information is measured

Before you begin to study the question of what is the power of the alphabet, and in general what it is, you should start, so to speak, with the basics.

Surely everyone knows that today there are special systems for measuring any values, based on reference values. For example, for distances and similar values, these are meters, for mass and weight - kilograms, for time intervals - seconds, etc.

But how to measure the information in terms of the volume of the text? It is for this that the concept of the power of the alphabet was introduced.

What is the power of the alphabet: the initial concept

So, if you follow the generally accepted rule that the final value of a quantity is a parameter that determines how many times the reference unit is stacked in the measured quantity, we can conclude: the power of the alphabet is the total number of characters used for a particular language.

To make it clearer, let us leave aside the question of how to find the power of the alphabet, and pay attention to the symbols themselves, naturally, from the point of view of information technology. Roughly speaking, the complete list of characters used contains letters, numbers, all kinds of brackets, special characters, punctuation, etc. However, if we approach the question of what the power of the alphabet is precisely in a computer way, here we should also include a space (a single gap between words or other characters).

Take, for example, the Russian language, or rather, the keyboard layout. Based on the foregoing, the complete list contains 33 letters, 10 numbers and 11 special characters. Thus, the total power of the alphabet is 54.

Information weight of characters

However, the general concept of the power of the alphabet does not determine the essence of computing the information volumes of a text containing letters, numbers and symbols. A special approach is required here.

Basically, think about it, well, what can be the minimum set from the point of view of a computer system, how many characters can it contain? The answer is two. And that's why. The fact is that each symbol, whether it be a letter or a number, has its own informational weight, by which the machine recognizes what exactly is in front of it. But the computer understands only the representation in the form of ones and zeros, on which, in fact, all computer science is based.

Thus, any character can be represented as sequences containing the numbers 1 and 0, that is, the minimum sequence denoting a letter, number or symbol consists of two components.

The information weight itself, taken as the standard information unit of measurement, is called a bit (1 bit). Accordingly, 8 bits are 1 byte.

Representation of characters in binary code

So, what is the power of the alphabet, I think, is already a little clear. Now let's look at another aspect, in particular, the practical representation of power using binary code. For simplicity, let’s take an alphabet containing only 4 characters.

In a two-digit binary code, the sequence and their informational representation can be described as follows:

Hence the simplest conclusion: with the power of the alphabet N = 4, the weight of a single symbol is 2 bits.

If you use a three-digit binary code for an alphabet, for example, with 8 characters, the number of combinations will be as follows:

In other words, with the power of the alphabet N = 8, the weight of one character for a three-digit binary code will be 3 bits.

How to find the power of the alphabet and use it in computer expression

Now let's try to look at the dependence, which is expressed by the number of characters in the code and the power of the alphabet. The formula, where N is the alphabetical power of the alphabet, and b is the number of characters in binary code, will look like this:

N = 2 ^b

That is, 2 ¹ = 2, 2 ² = 4, 2 ³ = 8, 2 ⁴ = 16, etc. Roughly speaking, the required number of characters of the binary code itself is the weight of the character. In information terms, it looks like this:

Volume Measurement

However, these were just the simplest examples, so to speak, for an initial understanding of what the power of the alphabet is. Let's go directly to practice.

At this stage in the development of computer technology for typing, taking into account uppercase, uppercase and lowercase letters, Cyrillic and Latin letters, punctuation marks, brackets, signs of arithmetic operations, etc. 256 characters are used. Based on the fact that 256 is 2 ⁸ , it is easy to guess that the weight of each character in such an alphabet is 8, that is, 8 bits or 1 byte.

Based on all the known parameters, we can easily get the value we need for the information volume of any text. For example, we have computer text containing 30 pages. On one page there are 50 lines of 60 any signs or symbols, including spaces.

Thus, one page will contain 50 x 60 = 3,000 bytes of information, and the entire text will be 3,000 x 50 = 150,000 bytes. As you can see, even small texts are inconvenient to measure in bytes. And what about whole libraries?

In this case, it is better to translate the volume into more powerful quantities - kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc. Based on the fact that, for example, 1 kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes (2 ¹⁰ ), and megabyte is 2 ¹⁰ kilobytes (1024 kilobytes), it is easy to calculate that the amount of text in the information-mathematical expression for our example will be 150,000 / 1,024 = 146, 484,375 kilobytes or approximately 0.14305 megabytes.

Instead of an afterword

In general, this is briefly and everything related to the consideration of the question of what is the power of the alphabet. It remains to add that in this description a purely mathematical approach was used. It goes without saying that the semantic load of the text is not taken into account in this case.

But, if we approach the issues of consideration precisely from a position that gives a person something to comprehend, a set of meaningless combinations or sequences of characters in this regard will have zero information load, although, from the point of view of the concept of information volume, the result can still be calculated.

On the whole, knowledge about the power of the alphabet and related concepts is not so difficult to understand and can be easily applied in the sense of practical actions. Moreover, any user is faced with this almost every day. It is enough to cite as an example the popular Word editor or any other at the same level in which such a system is used. But do not confuse it with the usual Notepad. Here, the power of the alphabet is lower, because when typing, say, capital letters.