Talk:Range encoding
|
|
I've rewritten what was here to be grammatically correct English. Later I hope to go back and edit, to put in detail on actual range encoding, and remove the claim added by Suns which seems (as far as I can tell) to be based solely on one particular implementation of range encoding, not on range encoding itself. (Why is arithmetic coding on the page arithmetic encoding, Huffman coding on the page Huffman encoding, but range encoding on the page Range encoder?)
What exactly is the difference between range and arithmetic encoding? I can't seem to see any difference in principle. This sentence from the article
- Arithmatic coding can be thought of as a form of range encoding with the range starting at zero and extending to one.
seems to confirm my suspicion that they are slightly different ways of describing the same thing. CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 12:10, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- That's the tricky thing. They are very nearly the same thing. However, the differences that there are, and the fact that range encoding has a practice that much more closely approximates its theory than arithmetic coding does, may make an important difference legally, in determining what patents do and don't cover. Range encoding, in both theory and practice, involves ranges of integers. Arithmetic coding in theory works with rational numbers between 0 and 1, but since practical considerations cause the precision to be limited to typically 32 bits, it's as if they were using 32-bit ranges of integers. There may be differences that I don't know about -- I don't pretend to be an expert -- but as far as I know, the differences that there are are mostly legal in nature. -- Antaeus Feldspar 19:01, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)