S.O. Rice's contributions to Shannon theory

The contributions of S.O. Rice to Shannon's formulations in communication theory are discussed. In 'Communication in the presence of noise-Probability of error for two encoding schemes' (see Bell Syst. Tech. J., vol.29, p.60-93, Jan. 1950) Rice considered two explicit construction schemes for choosing the transmitted signals of duration T and exhibited an exact formula for the probability of error in the decoded messages. Rice evaluated these unwieldy expressions and presented tables and curves showing the trade-off between rate, delay, and error probability. He obtained asymptotic expressions for the error probability for large delay, and showed that with his scheme for choosing the signals, Shannon's results could be obtained. He recognized from his numerical calculations that the error probability seemed to approach zero much more rapidly than this and that, in his asymptotics, he had evidently made approximations that might one day be improved.<
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