Burrows–Wheeler transform

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with a jumbled up puzzle? The pieces are all mixed up and you have to figure out how they fit together. Well, the Burrows-Wheeler transform is kind of like a puzzle that helps us make sense of jumbled up words.

Let's say we have the word "banana". The Burrows-Wheeler transform takes this word and rearranges the letters in a special way. First, it creates a table with all possible rotations of the word:

banana
ananaB
nanaBa
anaBan
naBana
aBanan

Then, it sorts these rotations by putting them in alphabetical order:

aBanan
anaBan
ananaB
naBana
nanaBa
banana

Now we can take the last letter of each row and put them together to make a new word: "nnbaaa". This new word is called the transformed word.

So why did we do all this? Well, the Burrows-Wheeler transform helps us compress and store large amounts of text more efficiently. By rearranging the text in this way, it can be compressed and stored in a smaller amount of space. And don't forget, it's all thanks to that jumbled up puzzle we learned to solve!