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--- courses:cs211:winter2018:journals:holmesr:section_4.1 [2018/03/06 03:58] – holmesr
+++ courses:cs211:winter2018:journals:holmesr:section_4.1 [2018/04/19 20:08] (current) – admin
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 I found this chapter surprisingly intuitive and stimulating and thus it was easily readable.
+===== Section 4.8 Huffman Codes and Data Compression =====
+This section begins by discussing different ways which one may encode data. One example discussed is the scheme using 1's and 0's which allows one to encode 2<sup>b</sup> symbols using b bits. Another scheme is one such as Morse Code, which uses different lengths of strings to encode different characters, based on frequency. Letters that occur more frequently, such as e, t, and a, use one- or two-bit strings while less frequent letters use four or five bit strings. This type of encoding is advantageous because the more frequent letters are quicker to encode, which saves time in the long run.
+The problem with such an encoding is that it is sometimes ambiguous. Since e is 0, t is 1, and 01 is a, a string 01 may either be et or a. The solution to this problem is adding a slight pause in between letters, but if the pause isn't long enough it may be missed and additionally the pause becomes its own type of bit.
+Such an ambiguity can be overcome by a construction called a prefix code. A prefix code is one in which the encoding for one letter in the alphabet can not be a prefix for another letter. In the Morse code example, e's encoding - 0, was a prefix for the encoding of a - 01. An example of a prefix code for the alphabet {a, b, c} could be a = 11, b = 01, c = 00. Using variable length encoding, it is possible to make an optimal prefix code by setting the most used letters to represent the shortest characters.
+A metric known as the ABL, or Average Bits per Letter, can be used to compare different variable length encodings and the lowest ABL is the optimal encoding. ABL is found by multiplying the length of each letter's encoding by its frequency in the document being encoded and then summing them together. There are two ways to accomplish this: Shannon-Fano codes and Huffman codes. Both these strategies involve building trees and assigning the a 0 to the left child and a 1 to the right child, but the way they build the trees differs vastly.
+The Shannon-Fano codes split the set of letters into two subsets of equal frequency and then recall themselves recursively on the subsets until each letter gets its own encoding. This top-down approach was a good start but a precursor to the superior Huffman codes. The important difference between Huffman codes and Shannon-Fano codes is that Huffman codes build up from the bottom, assigning the two least frequent letters to be children of a meta-letter and re-adding the meta-letter as a component of the alphabet for the algorithm to recursively operate on.
+This algorithm lends itself to the use of a priority queue because letters can be added into the priority queue with their frequencies being their keys. Now all that remains is insertion and deletion, both of which occur in O(log n) time. Since the algorithm is recursive and adds meta-letters back into the alphabet, it will carry out n loops which each use the aforementioned O(log n) time, thus giving O(n log n) total time.