Spread Unary Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces spread unary coding, a biologically inspired spatial variation of unary coding where each number is represented by multiple 1s, affecting the Hamming distance properties between code words.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel spread unary coding scheme that extends standard unary coding by representing numbers with multiple 1s, inspired by neural representations.

Findings

Spread unary coding increases the robustness of number representation.

It demonstrates saturation of Hamming distance between code words.

The scheme is biologically motivated and alters traditional unary coding properties.

Abstract

Unary coding is useful but it is redundant in its standard form. Unary coding can also be seen as spatial coding where the value of the number is determined by its place in an array. Motivated by biological finding that several neurons in the vicinity represent the same number, we propose a variant of unary numeration in its spatial form, where each number is represented by several 1s. We call this spread unary coding where the number of 1s used is the spread of the code. Spread unary coding is associated with saturation of the Hamming distance between code words.