Branchencodes

Branchencodes are a compact encoding scheme for representing branching structures in graphs, decision trees, and nonlinear narratives. A branchencode encodes each branching point and its outgoing choices into a sequence of symbols, enabling efficient storage, transmission, and processing of complex branch graphs. The concept is useful where the topology of choices, rather than the data values, must be preserved with minimal overhead.

In a branchencoded representation, each node's outgoing edges are assigned codewords over an alphabet. For fixed arity, fixed-length codes are used; for variable arity, prefix-free or length-prefixed codes are preferred. Common implementations use binary digits for simple 2-way branches, while multi-way branches use larger alphabets. A header may include node identifiers and topology, and decoding proceeds by reading codes in a predefined traversal order.

Branchencodes are used in game design tools, interactive fiction, and storytelling engines to serialize branching narratives, as well as in data formats that capture decision trees, behavior trees, or workflow graphs. They can also facilitate streaming of branching data over networks where bandwidth is constrained.

Advantages include compactness, deterministic decoding, and straightforward serialization. Limitations include encoding/decoding complexity, sensitivity to structural edits, and reduced human readability. They are most effective for static or slowly changing graphs with known branch distributions.