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I recall reading something in the 90s where in the 70s, Huffman coding was considered mathematically optimal compression and the whole field stagnated for a whi

by 13of40 6y ago

I recall reading something in the 90s where in the 70s, Huffman coding was considered mathematically optimal compression and the whole field stagnated for a while because they thought they'd reached a fundamental limit.

kaba0 6y ago
“Huffman's original algorithm is optimal for a symbol-by-symbol coding with a known input probability distribution, i.e., separately encoding unrelated symbols in such a data stream” -wikipedia So being pedantic, it is optimal in this specific meaning, but I don’t know about this stagnation.