re #1: the conflation is justified, but you couldn't guess that just from what was presented in the OP. There are some cool theorems which justify it tho---if

re #1: the conflation is justified, but you couldn't guess that just from what was presented in the OP. There are some cool theorems which justify it tho---if you like Kolmogorov complexity you are in for a fun ride. re #2: No. Basically the > part of it handles the case when the smallest program which prints out the string is actually LARGER than the length of the string. In that case, the string is still incompressible. Compression means mapping from larger strings to smaller strings.