The Environment and Messages from It

To do this, the software must be aware of conditions within the reactor therefore, we shall arrange that it is fed with regular messages from a digital thermometer in contact with the fermenting medium. The thermometer, and any other probes in the vessel, send messages to the software in the form of binary strings, such as  

The total length of the message is the same irrespective of which probe was responsible for it. The length is determined by the number of different detectors that are available, which determines the length of the identifier tag and by the precision to which the data are specified. 

Let us assume that messages from the digital thermometer are tagged with the identifier 00. The rest of the message conveys information about the current temperature, T. Table 9.1 shows how the message sent from the digital probe provides information about reactor conditions. 

It might appear that to use a short binary string to represent a message from a sensor such as a temperature probe, which monitors a property that can vary continuously over a real-number range, is to throw information 

---