Tom Scott

How Computers Compress Text: Huffman Coding and Huffman Trees (2017x37)

: 11, 2017

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.