Free software1 sections · 2 min readBy Dezső Mező.mdFree softwarePithos
Pithos is a data-compression demo that implements a complete Huffman coding pipeline from scratch: counting symbol frequencies, building the tree, deriving canonical codes, and encoding and decoding. It also computes Shannon entropy, which makes it a hands-on look at the information-theory limits the coder approaches. It is a from-scratch, dependency-light build - 13 tests include the prefix-free property and the average-code-length being within the [H, H+1) Shannon bound - that you can download and run locally.
01About the app
Data compression + information theory
What to take away
- A complete Huffman pipeline (frequencies → tree → canonical codes → encode/decode) plus Shannon entropy, all pure. 13 tests, including the prefix-free property and the average-code-length ∈ [H, H+1) Shannon bound.
- Download: Pithos (ZIP)
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