2023/12/27 by Gabriele Beretta, G. Chiarot, Beretta, G. +5
Computer Science · #Cellular Automata and Applications #Computability, Logic, AI Algorithms #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.16472
openalex publication_date 2023/12/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
One of the fundamental problems of information theory, since its foundation by Shannon in 1948, has been the computation of the capacity of a discrete memoryless channel, a quantity expressing the maximum rate at which information can travel through the channel. In the literature, several algorithms were proposed to approximately compute the capacity of a discrete memoryless channel, being an analytical solution unavailable for the general discrete memoryless channel. This paper presents a novel approach to compute the capacity, which is based on a continuous-time dynamical system. Such a dynamical system can indeed be regarded as a continuous-time version of the Blahut-Arimoto algorithm. In fact, the updating map appearing in the Blahut-Arimoto algorithm is here obtained as a suitable discretization of the vector flow presented, using an analogy with some game-theoretical models. Finally, this analogy suggests a high-level hardware circuit design enabling analog computation to estimate the capacity.