Huffman coding is a compression algorithm used to reduce the size of data without losing any information. It works by assigning shorter binary codes to more frequent characters and longer codes to less frequent ones, creating an efficient representation of the data. For example, if we have characters {a, b, c, d} with frequencies {2, 4, 14, 20}, the algorithm starts by treating each character as a leaf node in a binary tree.
It then repeatedly combines the two nodes with the smallest frequencies into a new internal node, summing their frequencies. This process continues until a single root node is formed, representing the entire tree. The resulting tree assigns binary codes to each character based on their position in the tree—left branches add 0 and right branches add 1.
For instance, a and b may get longer codes like 000 and 001, while d gets a shorter code like 1. Huffman coding is widely used in applications like file compression and data transmission due to its simplicity and efficiency.
