Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2019 iii Paper 323 2 i a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
Use base-two logarithms. The weakly typical sequence definition isEquivalently, . By the weak law of large numbers applied to the independent and identically distributed random variables , the probability of this typical set tends to one.
This captures the usual probability scale of a long sample, but it need not make every symbol frequency representative. For a fair binary source, every word has probability and , so even the all-zero word is weakly typical. The strongly typical sequence definition additionally controls empirical symbol frequencies and excludes this word for small tolerance. Thus weak typicality agrees with the high-probability-set intuition, while allowing individually unrepresentative members.