Lecture 15. 



Data compression has found many uses in our digitized world. Consumer electronics such as mp3 players and digital cameras use some form data compression. Today we looked at the so called Huffman coding invented by David Hufman for a homework assignment when he was a student in the early 1950s. Huffman's algorithm is fascinating in its own right, but it also serves as an excellent springboard to study data structures.

As we saw today the "priority queue" abstract data type is perfectly suited for implementing a phase of Huffman's algorithm. Furthermore a heap is the perfect data structure to implement a priority queue. Today I defined the heap's structural and ordering property. Next Friday we will continue studying heaps. 

Posted: Fri - February 9, 2007 at 09:56 AM          

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