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How Computers Compress Text: Huffman Coding and Trees

submitted by Mordhaus

7 years 3 months 1 week ago

Computers store text (or, at least, English text) as eight bits per character. There are plenty of more efficient ways that could work: so why don't we use them? And how can we fit more text into less space? Let's talk about Huffman coding, Huffman trees, and Will Smith.

4 Comments

ant

says...

*geek

siftbot

says...

Adding video to channels (Geek) - requested by ant.

MilkmanDan says...

Really cool. I remember a CS class I took talking about frequency tables for longer chains (ala .zip as he mentioned), but I don't remember the same class mentioning Huffman trees first, which seems like it would clearly be a better way to explain.

Maybe I was out to lunch that day.