Confused about Huffman Trees
- by ShrimpCrackers
A quick tutorial on generating a huffman tree
Confused about Huffman Trees. Near the end of that link above, it shows the tree with 2 elements left, and then the completed tree. I'm confused about the way that it is branched. Is there a specific way a huffman tree needs to be branched?
For example, 57:* with its right child 35:* is branched off to the right. Could it have been 35 branched to the left with 22 branched to the right? Also, why wasn't 22:* paired up with 15:4 - it just paired with 20:5 to create a new tree.
From initial obersvations it seems the tree does not need to be balanced or have any specific order other than that the frequencies of a leaf add up to the value of the parent node. Could two people creating a huffman tree with the same data end up with different encoding values?