[463] in Cypherpunks
Re: Huffman and Crypto
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (elee9sf@Menudo.UH.EDU)
Fri May 21 10:51:07 1993
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 20 May 93 15:55:42 EDT."
Date: Fri, 21 May 93 09:39:05 -0500
From: elee9sf@Menudo.UH.EDU
> 3) Does anyone know of an easy-to-get-sources, easy-to-use arithmetic
> coding compression program?
>
I have a book titled "Data Compression" or something like that, which
explains Huffman and Huffman-type coding, arithmetic coding,
dictionary compressers (sliding window LZ* types), and JPEG
compression. The book comes with source code, so if anybody else has
it and has a scanner...
As I recall, arithmetic compression works well, but is really cpu
intensive, even with a math-coprocessor. Plus, you need to have a
rough idea of the statistical breakdown of the plaintext for
arithmetic compression to work as well as it can. The Zimpel-Lev type
sliding window compressors are popular because they work well on most
inputs, with little or no pre-computation or statistics.
Isn't Phil Karn on this list? I'm sure he can tell you everything you
want to know about compression :-)
/-----------------------------------\
| Karl L. Barrus |
| elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu | <- preferred address
| barrus@tree.egr.uh.edu (NeXTMail) |
\-----------------------------------/
