4 ms·
This is true of all compression formats. The receiver has to know how to decode it. A good compression algorithm will attempt to send only the data that the rec
by c3534l 7y ago
This is true of all compression formats. The receiver has to know how to decode it. A good compression algorithm will attempt to send only the data that the receiver can't predict. If we both know you're sending English words, then I shouldn't have to tell you "q then u" - we should assume there's a "u" after "q" unless otherwise specified. This isn't new to this technique, it's a very common and old one (it's one of the first ones I learned watching a series of youtube lectures on compression or maybe it was just information theory in general) and it has been commonly called lossless compression none the less.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22807000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22807000 [Aside: I've heard they know nothing of qi in Qatar, ;oP]
- c3534l 7y agoYou're just not sending the database - you're sending whether or not it's the database. If you can only send a binary "is the database or is not the database" then 0 and 1 is indeed fully losslessly compressed information. If that's really what you want, then that's how you would do it. Full, perfect, lossless compression reduces your data down to only that information not shared between the sender and the receiver. Sending either 1 or 0 is, in fact, exactly what you want to do if the receiver already knows the contents of the database. Compression asks the question "what is the smallest amount of data I have to receive for the person on the other side to reconstruct the original data?" If the answer is "1 bit" then that's a perfectly valid message - the only information the receiver is missing is a single bit.