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I did a quick search on "infinite compression" and was somewhat taken aback at the results - I particularly like the one where the approach is described in a ra
by arethuza 6y ago
I did a quick search on "infinite compression" and was somewhat taken aback at the results - I particularly like the one where the approach is described in a rather vague way but then there is an offer:
"I’m a little busy these days. Do any of you have time to put this lossless, infinite compression algorithm, together? If you get it to work, I’ll split the royalties with you."
I can't work out if it is a joke or not....
- jacquesm 6y agoWell, here is how it works (takes off thinking cap): You don't go all the way in one go, the algorithm just does 1% compression each time so it leaves something for the next rounds. You then keep on doing that until you reach the desired size. It's not super fast but first let's get it to work. I already have a patent! There is just this one minor technical problem that I still need to overcome, but once that's done the sky is the limit.
- arethuza 6y ago"one minor technical problem that I still need to overcome" Presumably that would be decompression? ;-)
- jacquesm 6y agoNo, for some reason after 30 rounds or so of running it depending on the data that I feed it it will stop compressing. It's lossless after all, and after that the filesize slowly increases. Must be a bug somewhere. It decompresses just fine. How hard can it be? /s.
- arethuza 6y agoI had rather hoped you could repeat the process indefinitely = maybe to get down to one byte or even one bit. Only requiring one bit of storage would help a lot in lots of situations - not to mention the potential for increasing network throughput!
- jacquesm 6y agoI know, but first let's fix this one bug. With a potential of approaching infinite dollars any kind of valuation for this algorithm would be fair so how about it? One of the very first tech DDs I ever did was a totally rigged demo. I don't think I ever wrote about it. Those people must have really hated me for puncturing their balloon. Some other investors took the bait and lost tons of money.
- pftburger 6y agoI implemented it once as well, all the way down to single but storage. Turned out to be a huge security nightmare though, because it kept decompressing into other people’s files! Another problem was telling the compressed bits apart.
- Simon_says 6y agoWhy did you stop at 1 bit?
- jacquesm 6y agoOtherwise investors might get suspicious that something was up. On another note, I have this protocol that can transfer any file in just 64 bits. It needs a rather large dictionary on both sides but other than that it 'just works'. Interested?
- Simon_says 6y agoNah, I got another guy who can do it in 56 bits.
- sixhobbits 6y agoWhy even bother with this when you store infinite data in pi[0]? [0] https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- bloak 6y agoYou can really do that, sort of, for example: https://github.com/libnoon/compress https://github.com/libnoon/compress The problem, of course, is that you have to decompress the file a large number of times. (The length of that number looks suspiciously similar to the length of the original file.)
- jacquesm 6y agoHehe, that one is actually really funny and neat.
- ajuc 6y agoMy infinite compression algorithm totally works. It's just a little slow. def compress(input, threshold): decompressor = lambda: 0 while code_size(decompressor) > threshold or input != decompressor(): decompressor = randomize_code() return decompressor