4 ms·
> You wouldn't say HHHHHHHHH. You would just say "10 tosses, all heads" - bam! You've just compressed some data! Easy. I saved you hours of mindfuck lectures. T
by nurettin 7y ago
> You wouldn't say HHHHHHHHH. You would just say "10 tosses, all heads" - bam! You've just compressed some data! Easy. I saved you hours of mindfuck lectures. This is obviously an oversimplification
Oversimplification and exaggeration. Understanding Huffman encoding and deflate algorithm are just two five minute articles away.
- dTal 7y agoIt's also not compressed at all - the english prose is 21 characters, over twice as long. Also the English prose requires at least ASCII, while the string of H can be encoded with a single bit each. 168 bits > 10 bits. To be fair, it is faster to say, out loud, because our verbal "character set" is so much richer. A unit of pronunciation is roughly a syllable. "10 tosses, all heads" has only 5 syllables, while "ach ach ach..." takes 10. But this insight is a bit much to ask of someone new to the concept of compression.
- ljcn 7y agoIt's difficult to describe but I read it more like converting the raw data (a list of results) to a generator. Akin to the "compression" described in this xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/1155/ https://www.xkcd.com/1155/