Algorithms For Dummies

 Struggling with Big Data

It changed the way we stored data until the end of 1990s. You can read the details 

about  this  incredible  algorithm  in  a  September  1991  Scientific  American  article 

at 

http://www.huffmancoding.com/my-uncle/scientific-american

.  Huffman 

codes have three key ideas:

 

»

Encode frequent symbols with shorter sequences of bits. For instance, if 

your text uses the letter a often, but rarely uses the letter z, you can encode a 

using a couple of bits and reserve an entire byte (or more) for z. Using shorter 

sequences for common letters means that overall your text requires fewer 

bytes than when you rely on ASCII encoding.