Somewhat tangential, but if you want to obtain an intuitive understanding between probability and information (and thus understand many compression algorithms),

Somewhat tangential, but if you want to obtain an intuitive understanding between probability and information (and thus understand many compression algorithms), play around with this excellent interactive graphic from Wikipedia that explains arithmetic coding: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Arithmetic_coding_visualisation_circle.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Arithmet... It's from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding The ANS algorithm mentioned in the article has the theoretically-close-to-optimal compression ratio of arithmetic coding and the speed of Huffman coding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding)