CS502 Fundamentals of Algorithms Assignment No. 03 solution 20th January 2016

[Vuhelper]

Solution :

ypically characters are encoded by fixed length binary words. ASCII code uses 8 bits and Unicode uses 16 bits. Huffman encoding uses variable bit length words to encode the characters. Characters used more frequently have smaller length. In this way the encoding of string can be smaller then with fixed length words.
The Huffman code uses a binary tree to describe the code. Each letter of the alphabet is located at an external. The bit encoding is the path from the root to the letter with moving to the left child generating a 0 and moving to right child generating a 1. If we are actually using the tree to encode the text then we would need an additional locater structure. Normal one would make a lookup table and use the tree only to construct/determine the code. The tree is a satisfactory structure to decode.