To save even more data, replace every symbol with A. Then just store the amount of As.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
42 points (95.7% liked)
Programming
17655 readers
303 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Would it be better to use A's and B's? We could half the necessary length of a symbol by assigning a certain combination of A's and B's to a symbol. And if characters take up too much space we could use 1's and 0's instead!
Then we could make a language where the letters are equivalent to the number of As
To save sending the tree every time, we could just have a fixed layout of letters and symbols. This would have the advantage that we could put them in order, which would be easier to work with.
Before I opened this article I thought "I bet they just learned what Huffman Encoding is" and I stand my hypothesis. It's an extremely fun compression algorithm as it's very trivial to comprehend and reason about... it's straightforward enough you can write it yourself!