Huffman Codes

Data compression by assigning binary codes to characters.

For example, consider a 100,000 character file with only six different characters: a, b, c, d, e, f.

	a	b	c	d	e	f
Frequency	45k	13k	12k	16k	9k	5k
Fixed-Length Code	000	001	010	011	100	101	300,000 bits
Variable-Length Code	O	101	100	111	1101	1100	224,000 bits
							(optimal)

Huffman's algorithm determines optimal variable-length code (Huffman Codes).