From the course: Programming Foundations: Discrete Mathematics

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Network optimization with trees

Network optimization with trees

From the course: Programming Foundations: Discrete Mathematics

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Network optimization with trees

- [Voiceover] Using trees and graph theory, we can help with network optimization. Optimization is the process of looking for the best solution, whether this is the shortest path, a minimum spanning tree, or a minimum circuit. One important example of optimization is evaluating the amount of space used to store information. Remember, text files are stored on computers as binary strings, a series of ones and zeroes, in which each character is assigned a binary code representing that character. ASCII and Unicode character sets are examples of fixed length encodings. Variable length codes are much more efficient. Prefix codes are an example of variable length encoding. A prefix code has the property that the code for one character cannot be a prefix of the code for another character. They all must be unique. The fact that the codes are organized as a tree in which characters are only stored at the leaves, ensures the prefix property. An example would be a textbook that has 9,000…

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