
The Lost Huffman Paper (2010) - collapse
http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2010/08/08-12-10-lost-huffman-paper.html
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userbinator
_Most people in the implementation community also missed this paper (eg. zlib,
JPEG, etc. people who make important use of huffman decodes have missed these
techniques)._

Actually, ITU T.81 (the JPEG standard), published in 1992, contains a
flowchart that appears to implement the same algorithm, so I think Moffat and
Turpin were a few years "late to the party".

However, that's still not the fastest way to decode Huffman, since it involves
a loop --- the fastest is a single table lookup, which is practical for
smaller maximum code lengths (such a commonly encountered in JPEG.)

~~~
timb07
And presumably Turpin's PhD examiners weren't aware of the flowchart in the
JPEG standard either.

------
timb07
Andrew Turpin's implementation of a minimum-redundancy code (a.k.a. "Huffman
code") is here:
[https://github.com/turpinandrew/shuff](https://github.com/turpinandrew/shuff)

