Imagine you have a message with some letters and numbers, but some of them got mixed up and are hard to read. You want to fix them so the message makes sense. A Viterbi decoder is like a special detective that looks at all the different possible words that could fit in the message and tries to figure out which one is most likely the correct one.
The Viterbi decoder is really good at its job because it uses some clever tricks. First, it has a codebook that tells it what each possible word is in the message. Then, it looks at the messed-up letters and tries to figure out what the original letters were by guessing different words that could fit there.
Here's where the clever trick comes in. The Viterbi decoder doesn't just guess one letter at a time. Instead, it looks at all the possible words that could fit in that spot and calculates the likelihood that each word is the right one. It does this by looking at how often the letters in the word show up in other places in the message.
Once the Viterbi decoder has a list of all the possible words for each messed-up spot in the message, it then looks at all the different combinations of those words to see which combination makes the most sense. It does this by calculating the likelihood of each combination and picking the one that is most likely.
And there you have it! The Viterbi decoder has decoded the messed-up message by using some clever tricks to figure out the most likely words for each spot and then putting them together in the best possible way.