2017-09-11

[public] 1.41M views, 67.0K likes, 348 dislikes audio only

Tom Scott

Computers store text (or, at least, English text) as eight bits per character. There are plenty of more efficient ways that could work: so why don't we use them? And how can we fit more text into less space? Let's talk about Huffman coding, Huffman trees, and Will Smith.

Thanks to the Cambridge Centre for Computing History: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

Thanks to Chris Hanel at Support Class for the graphics: http://supportclass.net

Filmed by Tomek: https://youtube.com/tomek

And thanks to my proofreading team!

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