Could any of the thousands of other people working on digital computers in that era have thought of the idea?
Given the lack of simultaneous discovery over at least 5 years, no, nobody else thought of that idea (or if they did, they didn’t know how to make it work efficiently).
Look, man, you can pick any date in past 200 years and there will be Significant and Plausibly-Relevant events which happened around that time. In this case, I’d say the relevant events are less plausibly counterfactually impactful than average—after all, WWII was not the first war with widespread radio use (also this was at Bell Labs, their big use case was telephone lines), and no you do not need a digital computer to apply any error-correcting codes (I’ve personally done it by hand in homework assignments, there’s a learning curve but the complexity is not prohibitive). It is not at all plausible that the 40′s and 50′s were the first point in history where error-correcting codes were possible, and unlikely that they were the first point in history where error-correcting codes would have been useful.
We can come along today and see how easy it would have been for somebody to figure this stuff out, but that’s hindsight bias. Insofar as we can glean evidence about counterfactual worlds by looking at historical evidence at all, the evidence here generally points to the role of information theory being counterfactual: there was not prior or simultaneous discovery, and the main discovery which did happen was by the guy sharing an office with Shannon, within a few years of information theory.
(Notably, evidence against those core facts are the main things which would change my mind here: if there were prior or simultaneous discovery of reasonably-efficient error-correcting codes, by someone who didn’t know about info theory, then that would be clear evidence that Shannon’s work was not counterfactual for efficient error-correcting codes.)
You need a digital computer for the code to be practical. Otherwise why not just repeat every message 2-3 times? When humans are doing it, the cost of sending a message twice is less than the time it takes a human computer to do the math to reconstruct a message that may have been corrupted. This is because a human telegraph operator is also the I/O.
When I googled for it I found memoirs from the time period that credit hamming so I can’t prove the counterfactual, just note that there are a lot of possible encoding schemes that let you reconstruct corrupt messages.
But yeah sure, I am thinking from hindsight. I have done byte level encoding for communications on a few projects so I am very familiar with this, but obviously it was 60 years later.
One concrete example of a case where I expect error-correcting codes (along with compression) would have been well worth the cost: 19th-century transatlantic telegraph messages, and more generally messages across lines bottlenecked mainly by the capacity of a noisy telegraph line. In those cases, five minutes for a human to encode/decode messages and apply error correction would probably have been well worth the cost for many users during peak demand. (And that’s assuming they didn’t just automate the encoding/decoding; that task is simple enough that a mechanical device could probably do it.)
For the very noisy early iterations of the line, IIRC messages usually had to be sent multiple times, and in that case especially I’d expect efficient error-correcting codes to do a lot better.
Given the lack of simultaneous discovery over at least 5 years, no, nobody else thought of that idea (or if they did, they didn’t know how to make it work efficiently).
Look, man, you can pick any date in past 200 years and there will be Significant and Plausibly-Relevant events which happened around that time. In this case, I’d say the relevant events are less plausibly counterfactually impactful than average—after all, WWII was not the first war with widespread radio use (also this was at Bell Labs, their big use case was telephone lines), and no you do not need a digital computer to apply any error-correcting codes (I’ve personally done it by hand in homework assignments, there’s a learning curve but the complexity is not prohibitive). It is not at all plausible that the 40′s and 50′s were the first point in history where error-correcting codes were possible, and unlikely that they were the first point in history where error-correcting codes would have been useful.
We can come along today and see how easy it would have been for somebody to figure this stuff out, but that’s hindsight bias. Insofar as we can glean evidence about counterfactual worlds by looking at historical evidence at all, the evidence here generally points to the role of information theory being counterfactual: there was not prior or simultaneous discovery, and the main discovery which did happen was by the guy sharing an office with Shannon, within a few years of information theory.
(Notably, evidence against those core facts are the main things which would change my mind here: if there were prior or simultaneous discovery of reasonably-efficient error-correcting codes, by someone who didn’t know about info theory, then that would be clear evidence that Shannon’s work was not counterfactual for efficient error-correcting codes.)
You need a digital computer for the code to be practical. Otherwise why not just repeat every message 2-3 times? When humans are doing it, the cost of sending a message twice is less than the time it takes a human computer to do the math to reconstruct a message that may have been corrupted. This is because a human telegraph operator is also the I/O.
When I googled for it I found memoirs from the time period that credit hamming so I can’t prove the counterfactual, just note that there are a lot of possible encoding schemes that let you reconstruct corrupt messages.
But yeah sure, I am thinking from hindsight. I have done byte level encoding for communications on a few projects so I am very familiar with this, but obviously it was 60 years later.
One concrete example of a case where I expect error-correcting codes (along with compression) would have been well worth the cost: 19th-century transatlantic telegraph messages, and more generally messages across lines bottlenecked mainly by the capacity of a noisy telegraph line. In those cases, five minutes for a human to encode/decode messages and apply error correction would probably have been well worth the cost for many users during peak demand. (And that’s assuming they didn’t just automate the encoding/decoding; that task is simple enough that a mechanical device could probably do it.)
For the very noisy early iterations of the line, IIRC messages usually had to be sent multiple times, and in that case especially I’d expect efficient error-correcting codes to do a lot better.