erasure channel

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erasure channel A communication channel in which the effect of noise is to cause the decoder sometimes to be presented with an “error” symbol to decode. The decoder may then act in the knowledge that in such symbol positions the symbol actually transmitted is unknown: it is thus in a better position than when presented with an incorrect symbol but not the knowledge that it is incorrect (other than can be deduced by using an error-detecting or error-correcting code).

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