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[[de:Huffman-Code]] [[ja:ハフマン符号]] [[nl:Huffmancodering]] [[pl:Kodowanie Huffmana]] [[fi:Huffmanin_koodaus]]
In [[computer science]], '''Huffman coding''' is an [[entropy encoding]] [[algorithm]] used for [[data compression]] that finds the optimal system of encoding strings based on the relative frequency of each character. It was developed by [[David A. Huffman]] as a [[PhD]] student at [[MIT]] in [[1952]], and published in ''A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes''.
Huffman coding uses a specific method for choosing the representations for each symbol, resulting in a prefix-free code (that is, no bit string of any symbol is a prefix of the bit string of any other symbol) that expresses the most common characters in the shortest way possible. It has been proven that Huffman coding is the most effective compression method of this type: no other mapping of source symbols to strings of bits will produce a smaller output when the actual symbol frequencies agree with those used to create the code.
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