Huffmankódoláson

Huffmankódoláson refers to Huffman coding, a lossless data compression algorithm developed by David A. Huffman in 1952. It is a type of entropy encoding that assigns variable-length codes to input characters based on their frequencies. The more frequent a character, the shorter its code, and vice versa. This method is particularly effective for compressing data where certain symbols appear much more often than others, such as text files.

The algorithm works by constructing a binary tree, known as a Huffman tree. First, all unique characters in the input data are assigned a leaf node in the tree, with their frequency as the weight of the node. Then, the two nodes with the lowest weights are repeatedly merged to form a new parent node whose weight is the sum of its children's weights. This process continues until only one node remains, which is the root of the Huffman tree.

Once the tree is built, codes are assigned by traversing from the root to each leaf node. Typically, a '0' is assigned to a left branch and a '1' to a right branch. The sequence of 0s and 1s encountered along the path from the root to a character's leaf node forms its Huffman code. To decompress the data, the Huffman tree is reconstructed or transmitted along with the compressed data. The decoder then traverses the tree using the incoming bits to reconstruct the original characters. Huffman coding is widely used in various applications, including file archiving (like ZIP), image compression (like JPEG), and network protocols.