I’m guessing you’re saying that because of the pauses? Otherwise I don’t get it.
Yes, the space is a necessary symbol in Morse code, otherwise it’s impossible to decode.
Makes sense. I remember asking myself whether Morse was a form of Huffman encoding back when I was learning that stuff. And it kinda is going for that, but without actually doing it properly since it wasn’t a binary code per se and so could use the pauses. “Ternary” makes sense.
I’d say it’s quinary but can easily be represented binarily
-
short mark, dot or dit ( ▄ ): 1
-
longer mark, dash or dah ( ▄▄▄ ): 111
-
intra-character gap (between the dits and dahs within a character): 0
-
short gap (between letters): 000
-
medium gap (between words): 0000000
You can do it with three symbols:
- Dot: 10
- Dash: 1110
- Gap: 00
The long gap between words is just three short gaps.
There’s a Vsauce video about this: https://youtu.be/HY_OIwideLg
