Asymmetric numeral systems

Asymmetric numeral systems (ANS) is a family of entropy encoding methods introduced by Jarosław (Jarek) Duda from Jagiellonian University, used in data compression since 2014 due to improved performance compared to previously used methods, being up to 30 times faster. ANS combines the compression ratio of arithmetic coding (which uses a nearly accurate probability distribution), with a processing cost similar to that of Huffman coding. In the tabled ANS (tANS) variant, this is achieved by constructing a finite-state machine to operate on a large alphabet without using multiplication. Among others, ANS is used in the Facebook Zstandard compressor (also used e.g. in Linux kernel, Android operating system, was published as RFC 8478 for MIME and HTTP), in the Apple LZFSE compressor, Google Draco 3D compressor(used e.g.