Universal Coding (Part II)

03/12/2013

Last time, we presented universal codes and two simple code. This week, let’s revisit the topic and present Elias codes, which are much better universal codes than Chaitin’s and modified Chaitin codes.

We will use the idea of recursion introduced before, but we will push the idea further, getting codes with lengths O(\lg n + \lg\lg n + \lg\lg\lg n + \cdots), which are pretty much as good as it gets.

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