Huffman Coding Assignment

Collaboration

Collaboration

Discussing the assignment requirements with others is a reasonable thing to do, and an excellent way to learn. However, the work you hand-in must ultimately be your work. This is essential for you to benefit from the learning experience, and for the instructors and TAs to grade you fairly. Handing in work that is not your original work, but is represented as such, is plagiarism and academic misconduct. Penalties for academic misconduct are outlined in the university calendar.

Here are some tips to avoid plagiarism in your programming assignments.

1. Cite all sources of code that you hand-in that are not your original work. You can put the citation into comments in your program. For example, if you find and use code found on a web site, include a comment that says, for example:

# the following code is from https://www.quackit.com/python/tutorial/python_hello_world.cfm.

Use the complete URL so that the marker can check the source.

2. Citing sources avoids accusations of plagiarism and penalties for academic misconduct. However, you may still get a low grade if you submit code that is not primarily developed by yourself. Cited material should never be used to complete core assignment specifications. You can and should verify and code you are concerned with your instructor/TA before submission.

3. Discuss and share ideas with other programmers as much as you like, but make sure that when you write your code that it is your own. A good rule of thumb is to wait 20 minutes after talking with somebody before writing your code. If you exchange code with another student, write code while discussing it with a fellow student, or copy code from another person’s screen, then this code is not yours.
   
   
4. Collaborative coding is strictly prohibited.Your assignment submission must be strictly your code. Discussing anything beyond assignment requirements and ideas is a strictly forbidden form of collaboration. This includes sharing code, discussing code itself, or modelling code after another student's algorithm. You can not use (even with citation) another student’s code.

5. Making your code available, even passively, for others to copy, or potentially copy, is also plagiarism.

6. We will be looking for plagiarism in all code submissions, possibly using automated software designed for the task. For example, see Measures of Software Similarity (MOSS - https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/).

7. Remember, if you are having trouble with an assignment, it is always better to go to your TA and/or instructor to get help than it is to plagiarize. A common penalty is an F on a plagiarized assignment.

Writing a program with classes object and recursion.

Technology

Python 3

You must submit your assignment electronically. Use the Assignment 4 dropbox in D2L for the electronic submission. You can submit multiple times over the top of a previous submission. Do not wait until the last minute to attempt to submit. You are responsible if you attempt this and time runs out. Your assignment must be completed in Python 3 and be executable with Python version 3.6.8+. You should not import any python libraries to create the Huffman trees or determine a Huffman code.

In this assignment you are given a partially complete program designed to take an ASCII file and compress it. Compression is when you take information that occupies a certain quantity of space and through an algorithmic method reduce it to occupy less space by ‘encoding’ it. To be useful, this process should contain a method to ‘decode’ the data back from the compressed form to be read.

Compression is used across electronic media from simple text compression to image compression like jpg and video compression like mp4. In this assignment you will be complete two Python classes to finish the compression program. Instructions in the assignment will lead you through each of the classes to complete parts of each so that the program operates correctly at the end. Similar to how assignment 2 required you to complete functions to make that program complete, this assignment will have you complete objects and their internal methods (object functions) to make it work. This is a common software engineering challenge where a ‘class’ must be completed according to the specifications given to you.

You will be creating a solution to achieve Huffman Coding. Huffman Coding is optimal when encoding ASCII symbols one at a time. Optimal here is defined as the resulting text is reduced from the original byte quantity to the smallest byte quantity possible. Later courses in Computer Science discuss the math that supports this, however for this assignment we will follow a simple greedy algorithm that gives us a Huffman Code without needing to know why it is correct or optimal.

You do not have to deal with command line arguments, opening files, exceptions, in this assignment. The challenges will be completing two python files each that contain object methods used by the main program. When completing these files you must implement the Huffman Tree and Encoding Table with your own code and are not allowed to import libraries to accomplish this.