20 Jun
2006
20 Jun
'06
3:48 p.m.
I'm not sure exactly you define efficiency, but I'm pretty sure that this is impossible. If the first k values use half the available code space, as n goes to infinity this half of the code space will be used for values with asymptotically zero (O(1/log(n)) of the probability distribution. I don't see how this can be anything but inefficient. Franklin T. Adams-Watters -----Original Message----- From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> Is there a better encoding of Zipf alphabets such that the encoding of the symbol of relative probability 1/i is _independent_ of the alphabet size and the encoding tends towards 100% efficiency asymptotically?