Combinatorial Analysis

The fourth volume of Rudolf Ahlswede’s lectures on Information Theory is focused on Combinatorics. Ahlswede was originally motivated to study combinatorial aspects of Information Theory via zero-error codes: in this case the structure of the coding problems usually drastically changes from probabilistic to combinatorial. The best example is Shannon’s zero error capacity, where independent sets in graphs have to be examined. The extension to multiple access channels leads to the Zarankiewicz problem.