Redundancy

In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system. In safety-critical systems, such as fly-by-wire aircraft, some parts of the control system may be triplicated. An error in one component then may then be out-voted by the other two. See safety engineering.

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In information theory, redundancy is the number of bits used to transmit a message minus the number of bits of actual information in the message. Data compression is a way to eliminate such redundancy.

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See also:

• Tautology
• Pleonasm