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I once found a really great article explaining arithmetic encoding¹, and I felt I understood what was going on and managed to re-implement the article's example

I once found a really great article explaining arithmetic encoding¹, and I felt I understood what was going on and managed to re-implement the article's example from MS-DOS-era C to modern Python, but when I tried to use it for anything else it didn't work and I wasn't smart enough to debug it. The claim that asymmetric numeral systems are simpler than arithmetic encoding is quite interesting, but as a working programmer, I have difficulty with the academic language and mathematical generality used in papers like this. Does anybody have a more approachable explanation of what's going on? ¹: http://marknelson.us/1991/02/01/arithmetic-coding-statistical-modeling-data-compression/ http://marknelson.us/1991/02/01/arithmetic-coding-statistica...

eln1 10y ago
Here are explanations of various people: http://www.ezcodesample.com/abs/abs_article.html http://www.ezcodesample.com/abs/abs_article.html http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2014/02/02-18-14-understanding-ans-conclusion.html http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2014/02/02-18-14-understandi... http://fastcompression.blogspot.fr/2013/12/finite-state-entropy-new-breed-of.html http://fastcompression.blogspot.fr/2013/12/finite-state-entr... (Yann Collet, he has many posts) https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/rans-notes/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/rans-notes/ interactive simulator: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/DataCompressionUsingAsymmetricNumeralSystems/ http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/DataCompressionUsingAsymme...