After 60 Years, Scientists Finally Know How To Improve Data Transfer And Communications

Since the 60s, scientists are working on finding a way to improve data transfer, enhancing in this way the speed with which we download files, the quality of our phone conversations and satellite transmitions. Now, they’ve done it! EPFL researchers unlocked the mystery, opening the door to better and greater computers, smartphones and data storage systems #todaymagic

Researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne won an award at the Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC 2016), after discovering how to “send enough data to account for potential data loss but without overloading the channel, which would undermine the speed of information transfer.” In other words, how to send a larger quantity of data faster and without disruptions.

They started writing a code for a scheme that can eliminate noise during data transfer. On the receiving end, they discovered that the key resided in the symmetry of the code: “We determined that, if we know the communication channel that will be used, we can precisely identify the best code to be used,” said Marco Mondelli, a researcher at EPFL’s Communication Theory Laboratory and one of the article’s authors. “It just needs to be structured and symmetrical.”

Symmetry, folks. The answer is symmetry.