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Can the index be reliably represented in fewer bytes than the data itself?
by jacobkg 7y ago
Can the index be reliably represented in fewer bytes than the data itself?
- jameshart 7y agothis question is equivalent to asking a physicist about a machine, ‘but can it reliably do more work than you put in to it?’ The equivalent of the law of thermodynamics in this case is the pigeonhole principle.
- ramshorns 7y agoIn fact, no compression scheme can reliably compress data to fewer bytes than it started as, thanks to the pigeonhole principle.
- CydeWeys 7y agoNope. On average it takes much more information to represent the index than the data itself. "Compress" is definitely a misnomer here.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]