Source coder structural constraints and information patterns

Summary form only given, as follows. Papers by Fine and Gibson and Fischer provide an approach to the design of data compression systems subject to a constraint on the transmitted alphabet. One step in this procedure employs what has been called the minimum search property. Gabor et al. claim that this minimum search property may not be satisfied by optimal encoder/decoder pairs and present a purported counterexample with certain structural constraints. It is shown that the minimum search property is satisfied by encoder/decoder pairs with classical information patterns, as required in the theory presented by Fine and by Gibson and Fischer, and that the counterexample is invalid since it has a nonclassical information pattern imposed by the structural constraints. The example is solved with a classical information pattern and the minimum search property.