Thursday, October 19, 2017

Error Correction and Detection in old Sanskrit Chants and their Modern day equivalents


Ancient Vedas and Vedic chants are protected from alteration/error-injection in lyrics by two ways:





    • Modern day mapping  (wrt to encoding data only) for these chandas in REST-APIs,Google-Protocol-Buffer, Facebook-Thrift, Sun-RPC, Microsoft-COM, RMI. In these protocols also data is encoded/decoded  using certain rules. 



    •    Limitation of both chandas and modern-schemes are:
      • Intelligent cracker can inject deliberate data. In chandas it is little easier. 
      • But in modern day communications the data corruption is checked by digests/checksums




  • Second protection for (especially on important) chantings, comes by the oral repetition and memorisation of chant's words . Mainly these things were called as Ghana ,  Jata

One advantages of  Modern day's data is stored in books, persistent mediums (before send to air, wire,etc) which are cheap and widely available.


Disadvantage for  Vedic chants  is there is no cheap and widely available mediums to store them  persistently. Vedic were orally transmitted with very less usage of persistent medium (as only persistent medium were palm-leafs, costly-copper-plates). So vedic students memorised the chantings by this error correcting Ghana/Jata/etc.