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This is an old story, but a fun one. To me it is clear that Mike Goldman should have paid up. Patrick clearly completed the challenge placed on him. While Pat
by CJefferson 14y ago
This is an old story, but a fun one.
To me it is clear that Mike Goldman should have paid up. Patrick clearly completed the challenge placed on him.
While Patrick didn't obey the spirit of the challenge he obeyed the law, and Mike knew full well that the spirit of his challenge was impossible!
- emn13 14y agoAlso, I'm not sure it was very wise of Mike to assume the data was truly incompressible. It's unlikely someone would manage to compress it (certainly for just 5k), but if you truly believe you have a source for billions or trillions of bits and that those bits then have exactly 100% as much entropy - well, you're taking a lot on faith. Indeed the fact that the content length was preselected implies some amount of regularity that might be (abused). Oh well.
- emn13 14y agoI don't agree - Patrick was (ab)using the discrepancy between file content size and file store size. For a single compressed file this may not be very relevant (hence its omission in the original problem description), but the changed rules proposed by patrick also didn't address it. As the designer of those new rules it was his responsibility to be clear, particularly since he was intending to use that discrepancy to his advantage. Yeah, Mike was stupid and not exactly nice - but that doesn't mean Patrick wasn't too.