A criticism of the ACW algorithm

AbstractData compression via the Huffman algorithm, which is a data compression technique, is the most efficient technique between single symbol data compression techniques. This algorithm is counted among statistical data compression techniques. Many efforts have been made for optimizing this technique and some algorithms have been presented, too. One of these algorithms is the ACW algorithm which is presented by Hussein Al-Bahadili et al. At first, they used the Huffman algorithm and then used the results of the Huffman algorithm as the input of their algorithm to calculate the optimum character wordlength. So, they decreased the stored characters via increasing the character wordlength for doing the compression. In this paper, we examined and criticized the ACW algorithm and presented some of its weaknesses via suitable counterexamples. At the end, it was concluded that the optimum character wordlength can never be calculated by extant techniques