21.6 - Encoding Messages
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Practice Questions
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What is the main purpose of encoding messages?
💡 Hint: Think about how computers understand data.
Define a prefix code in your own words.
💡 Hint: Consider how decoding would work with such a code.
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Interactive Quizzes
Quick quizzes to reinforce your learning
What does variable length encoding do?
💡 Hint: Think about how frequent letters would be represented.
True or False: Prefix codes can lead to ambiguous decoding.
💡 Hint: Consider how decoding works with non-prefix codes.
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Challenge Problems
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You have the frequencies: X=0.5, Y=0.25, Z=0.15, W=0.1. Create a Huffman tree and assign codes based on your construction.
💡 Hint: Pair the least frequent nodes first to build the tree iteratively.
If the average length of encoded bits per letter for a given alphabet is calculated as 3.5, and you redesign the encoding to reduce it to 2.8, explain the impact on data transfer.
💡 Hint: Think about how much space bytes take up and how averages affect large data sets.
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