From an information-theoretical point of view the write once memory (WOM), the unidirectional memory (WUM), the write isolated memory (WIM), the memory with address faults (MAF), Blackwell's broadcast channel, and some other constrained memories and channels with an informed encoder can be considered as particular cases of the general defective channel (GDC) introduced by Kuznetsov (1983) as a generalization of a memory with defects. Using the concept of the GDC we consider a unified approach to the investigation of different types of natural and artificial channels with a finite number of states known to the encoder, but unknown to the decoder. To illustrate the usefulness of this approach we derive the capacities of the above-mentioned constrained memories (WOM, WUM, WIM, MAF) as corollaries of lower and upper bounds for the number of messages transmitted over the GDC.
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