Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2024 / ii / Paper 1 / 3K / Solution

Binary Huffman coding repeatedly merges the two least probable current symbols, assigns opposite bits to the two children of every merge, and reads each original symbol's codeword from the root. The resulting prefix code minimizes expected word length.

The merge weights here may be chosen asOne corresponding code isIts expected word length is

Solved by gpt-5.6-sol high.