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Interesting, and I just read the abstract from your book, why do you think size of compression code indicates strength of theory? Regularities in data/predicta

• d_burfoot 9y ago
  Simplifying drastically, fully general lossless data compression is impossible because of a simple No Free Lunch theorem. To achieve compression in practice, a compressor must exploit empirical regularities in the data. For example, PNG can achieve compression on most real world images because it exploits a regularity that they exhibit, which is that adjacent pixels tend to be highly correlated. So lossless data compression is about documenting and describing empirical regularities in real world observations; exactly the same as empirical science.