So if we just get the pointer of where that message is contained in the number and then calculate the number up to that pointer then we'll have ourselves the me

So if we just get the pointer of where that message is contained in the number and then calculate the number up to that pointer then we'll have ourselves the message. As others have pointed out, the pointer would be longer than the original text in many cases. It's very easy to express in layman's terms why perfect compression does not exist. If you had a compression algorithm that compressed every piece of data, it would introduce non-determinism. Say you had 4 bits (16 possibilities) and always compressed to fewer than 4 bits (8 possibilities), then one or more compressed datapoints would map to multiple uncompressed datapoints. Or in other words, you would lose information. For a nice, format description, see Shannon's original paper: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948...