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Just conceptually, compression is an analog of understanding To be able to compress something, you need to understand it first We use this everyday, we compre
by nico 3y ago
Just conceptually, compression is an analog of understanding
To be able to compress something, you need to understand it first
We use this everyday, we compress things by naming them
Once we name something, we don’t need to explain or describe, we can just use the name instead
That allows us to compress our communications and it directly affects the parties understanding of the information
That’s just conceptually. At a math/algorithm level I don’t really know the specifics of your research or the paper in question
- ks2048 3y agoYes, I agree. That's why I said directly (with regards to compression algorithms used for understanding). Indirectly, yes, compression and intelligence/understanding are closely related.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoIt may sound strange out of context, but the most memorable quote I've encountered in any book or any piece of writing anywhere, at least in terms of informing my own understanding of language and the construction of meaning through communication, came in a book on screen writing by William Goldman. The guy who wrote The Princess Bride, of all things. The sentence was simply, (and in capitals in the original), "POETRY IS COMPRESSION."
- quickthrower2 3y agoWould make a good haiku line 2
- mannykannot 3y agoOne could say that you need to understand something about the artifact you are compressing, but, to be clear, you can compress text without understanding anything about its semantic content, and this is what gzip does. The only understanding needed for that level of compression is that the thing to be compressed is a string in a binary alphabet.
- joshuamorton 3y agoOf course, which is why gzip is a good baseline for "better" compressors that do have semantic understanding. The whole idea of an autoencoder is conceptual compression. You take a concept (say: human faces) and create a compressor that is so overfit to that concept that when given complete goobldygook (random seed data) it decompresses that to something with semantic meaning!