Oh, this is very cool. I understand the FSE Zstandard on a very handwavy level after reading some articles, but hopefully the Professor himself might be able to explain the principles more clearly, and also where the lines are drawn between FSE, more general tANS and even more general ANS.

My handwavy layman's understanding is basically "arithmetic coding is like huffman but you have arbitrary-sized ranges rather than binary divisions of the probabilities, and FSE compared to arithmetic coding is kind of analogous to when you take the naive floating point divisions you might use to draw a diagonal line on the screen and then you replace that with integer subtraction and a remainder".

#LibrePlanet #ANS #tANS #FSE #zstd #zstandard #FiniteStateEntropy #AsymmetricNumeralSystems