Minimum breakdown degradation in binary source encoding

A memoryless binary equiprobable source produces one letter per second. Two people each are provided separately with private information about the source data at a rate of bit per second. Suppose that by pooling their information they can produce a long-mn reconstruction of the source output that has arbitrarily small error frequency. We prove that then the least common asymptotic error frequency d that each can achieve without the other\´s help is . Since it had been shown previously that , our result closes the so-called "007 gap." New analytical techniques introduced to effect the proof are of broader significance in multiuser information theory.