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The length of a typical Huffman codeword

R. Schack

adap-orgarXiv:adap-org/9303001

Abstract

If p is the probability of a letter of a memoryless source, the length l of the corresponding binary Huffman codeword can be very different from the value -log p. We show that, nevertheless, for a typical letter, l is approximately equal to -log p. More precisely, the probability that l differs from -log p by more than m decreases exponentially with m.

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