Participant: August Mohr
Format: Poster and Conversation
Themes: paradigm, praxis, recursion

“As the leaves are lit, so grows the tree.”Alexander Pope originally said “As the twig is bent …” — a classic statement about conscious purpose and man’s control over nature. But the real world works the other way around.

Minimum Redundancy Coding, more commonly known as Huffman Coding, is one of the underpinnings of Computer Science. It is used to create a tree-structure of binary choices to represent data and that data can represent just about anything.”Huffman Code is one of the fundamental ideas that people in computer science and data communications use all the time”, says Stanford’s Donald E. Knuth, author of the multi-volume series “The Art of Computer Programming”.

David Huffman, as a graduate student, solved a problem that had stumped minds like Claude Shannon, the creator of the field of Information Theory, and thereby earned his immortality in computer science. Where Shannon was trying to maximize meaning, Huffman abandoned the idea. Huffman’s solution is amazingly simple and its fundamental tree-structured approach is truly a “pattern that connects”. It has both technical applications and metaphorical implications that cover the gamut, including how we interpret our own lives.

Bateson said, “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”. Huffman’s approach suggests that a quest for maximum meaning and first principles is not the way nature works. This discussion will describe and explain the original application of Minimum Redundancy, the coding of data according to its probability. This will be a non-mathematical description of the concept only. I will then stretch the basic pattern into other domains, some rigorous, some speculative. I welcome participation from anyone who has tree-structures to interpret.