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The tag now exists.

After some discussion in the chat, I propose to create a new tag about Information- and Coding theory. We've already had a number of challenges that would fit this tag very well and I think there are many more to come. It would add context to those challenges that is not possible to express with the current tags. So far the only tags that go in this direction are compression, error-correction and kolmogorov-complexity, (also checksum , cryptography ), which are just three specific areas of this topic.

Originally I proposed "coding-theory", but that alone would (perhaps?) be prone to be misunderstood, so I'd suggest , as "information- and coding theory" would be too long. Furthermore both topics usually go hand in hand, even if information theory technically contains coding theory as a field.

In the following list I collected a few examples (there are many more) that I think would fit very well:

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I don't see a problem with . Tags have wikis and wiki summaries for a reason: to say "This tag is about X", and often "If your question is about Y then you should use tag Y instead". We may have to retag things which are inappropriately tagged, but we already have to do that quite a lot with questions which misuse the winning criterion tags.

It's certainly not too specific: the list of questions you've given would put it on page 5 of 8.

There may be a case for an tag as well, but since that is so much wider I don't think that either precludes the existence of the other.

Proposed tag wiki for :

Questions relating to mathematical codes: Huffman encoding, Reed-Solomon encoding, etc.

If your question is about ciphers, prefer . If it is about compression, in general prefer . This is not mutually exclusive with those tags, but it is more oriented to codes which don't have another related tag.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ flawr, I'll add a proposed tag wiki for coding-theory if you want, but if you already have ideas for what you would write then it might be best for you to edit that into the question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Commented Dec 15, 2017 at 9:45
  • \$\begingroup\$ That would be nice, I haven't thought about the details yet! And I understand what you're saying about the name, I didn't consider that, but you're right! \$\endgroup\$
    – flawr
    Commented Dec 15, 2017 at 13:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ So is it correct that you would make two separate tags information-theory and coding-theory? \$\endgroup\$
    – flawr
    Commented Dec 15, 2017 at 21:08
  • \$\begingroup\$ @flawr, to be precise I think you've made a sufficient case for coding-theory; I don't know whether information-theory is necessary as well, but if it can be useful then I'm in favour of creating both. I avoiding referencing it in the proposed tag wiki as a precaution in case only coding-theory is created. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Taylor
    Commented Dec 15, 2017 at 22:44

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