Spread Unary Coding
This addresses a coding efficiency problem for applications using unary numeration, but it appears incremental as it modifies an existing method.
The paper tackles the redundancy in standard unary coding by proposing spread unary coding, a variant where each number is represented by multiple 1s, resulting in saturation of the Hamming distance between code words.
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.