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That algorithm sounds like total B.S. As if someone could stumble onto a lossless compression algorithm with file sizes 50% of an mp3. Even a comparable size wo

That algorithm sounds like total B.S. As if someone could stumble onto a lossless compression algorithm with file sizes 50% of an mp3. Even a comparable size would be a huge compression breakthrough. And there are theoretical limits to what you can do with lossless compression and I suspect that the algorithm in the show breaks those.

ZenPro 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
minimaxir 13y ago
If you think the feasibility of the algorithm is the most unrealistic thing here, I'd say Mike Judge is doing his job well. :P
- anon4 13y ago
  Well, everything else can be waived as marketing-speak. From a cursory glance it looked like the landing page for a small team that came up with some cool compression technology and then got some marketing wiz-kid to throw up a webpage. Everything except the technological claims I could just disregard.
  - checker 13y ago
    I was confused for a second and thought this was the most ego-centric startup I've ever come across. What team stares at you from 80% of the landing page instead of revealing the product?
carlosdp 13y ago
That's pretty much the only thing in the show that doesn't "make sense" though. They clearly made a real effort to use real world terminology and archetypes so that developers wouldn't be too distracted by inaccuracies and concentrate on the comedy. Even the way they discovered the algorithm was pretty on-point technical wise. The premise that people are interested in the underlying technology of a product rather than the product itself is also a common theme in the valley. I personally am impressed with the show thus far.
- batmansbelt 13y ago
  I enjoy the show as well, but no one is ever going accidentally invent a quantum leap in compression technology like that. He might as well have accidentally cured cancer for as much sense it makes.
Dirlewanger 13y ago
Maybe that's why it's a TV show.
devindotcom 13y ago
Killed it for me too, just like the lightsabers in Star Wars.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
omarhegazy 13y ago
Yes, similar to why I flog my children for liking Toy Story : toys cannot move or talk, fools! At one point these complaints stop being "this is too much to suspend my disbelief" and become "yes an opportunity to thinly veil my desire to seem smarter than everyone by pointing out every single insignificant mistake!".
- batmansbelt 13y ago
  I suspend disbelief, and I enjoy the show. I am just critical of how they chose this magic algorithm as the McGuffin. I guess it's easier to write as a justification for a billion-dollar profit possibility than trying to foresee the next social media revolution. That's fine. It comes down to what is writable, but the trade off here irks my technical sensibility.
AnthonyMouse 13y ago
> And there are theoretical limits to what you can do with lossless compression and I suspect that the algorithm in the show breaks those. Compression schemes achieve better results the more they're tailored to the data you're compressing. The theoretical limits are not the issue. For example, here's my compression algorithm for popular movies: You take the most popular 255 movies of all time as of a particular date and include an uncompressed copy of all of them within the compression algorithm itself. Then the compression scheme works as follows: If the first byte is not a zero, the decompression code will emit one of the 255 most popular movies, and the 255 possible non-zero values for the first byte identify which one. If the first byte is a zero, what follows is an uncompressed copy of a movie that is not one of the 255 most popular movies, and the decompression code merely strips the first byte. Using that algorithm I can compress each of the 255 most popular movies into a single byte. That's basically the theoretical limit. You could create a compression algorithm that could compress every film ever released into maybe three or four bytes. The problem is naturally that such an algorithm is a) completely useless for all the films that haven't been released before the algorithm is created, and b) completely impractical because the compression algorithm itself is far too large to be distributed or stored efficiently. Because it's a trade off, and achieving the theoretical limit for data size takes the trade off too far in the direction of specializing the algorithm to the data. But that doesn't mean there can't exist algorithms that make a more interesting trade-off than the existing ones do. Suppose you specifically design a compression algorithm for music. It's pre-programmed with the sounds made by common musical instruments and that are common in human singing. If the recording contains a guitar playing a G#, the algorithm identifies it as a guitar playing a G# and calculates the difference in pitch, volume, tempo, etc. between the recording and the idealized note built into the algorithm. That would be a significantly more complicated compression algorithm than most of those currently used, and it probably wouldn't get very good compression ratios for recordings of things other than music, but you would have something that could conceivably compress most music better than existing compression algorithms.
- batmansbelt 13y ago
  1. I think that's why they generally include the size of the decompressor in compression contests. 2. Great points re domain, but on the show they specifically say that the algorithm is general purpose, and the talk about using it for compressing images, documents, etc. I don't know about you, but I don't have any G#s in my excel spreadsheets. ;-)

ZenPro 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

minimaxir 13y ago

If you think the feasibility of the algorithm is the most unrealistic thing here, I'd say Mike Judge is doing his job well. :P

anon4 13y ago
Well, everything else can be waived as marketing-speak. From a cursory glance it looked like the landing page for a small team that came up with some cool compression technology and then got some marketing wiz-kid to throw up a webpage. Everything except the technological claims I could just disregard.
- checker 13y ago
  I was confused for a second and thought this was the most ego-centric startup I've ever come across. What team stares at you from 80% of the landing page instead of revealing the product?

carlosdp 13y ago

That's pretty much the only thing in the show that doesn't "make sense" though. They clearly made a real effort to use real world terminology and archetypes so that developers wouldn't be too distracted by inaccuracies and concentrate on the comedy. Even the way they discovered the algorithm was pretty on-point technical wise. The premise that people are interested in the underlying technology of a product rather than the product itself is also a common theme in the valley. I personally am impressed with the show thus far.

batmansbelt 13y ago
I enjoy the show as well, but no one is ever going accidentally invent a quantum leap in compression technology like that. He might as well have accidentally cured cancer for as much sense it makes.

Dirlewanger 13y ago

Maybe that's why it's a TV show.

devindotcom 13y ago

Killed it for me too, just like the lightsabers in Star Wars.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

omarhegazy 13y ago

Yes, similar to why I flog my children for liking Toy Story : toys cannot move or talk, fools! At one point these complaints stop being "this is too much to suspend my disbelief" and become "yes an opportunity to thinly veil my desire to seem smarter than everyone by pointing out every single insignificant mistake!".

batmansbelt 13y ago
I suspend disbelief, and I enjoy the show. I am just critical of how they chose this magic algorithm as the McGuffin. I guess it's easier to write as a justification for a billion-dollar profit possibility than trying to foresee the next social media revolution. That's fine. It comes down to what is writable, but the trade off here irks my technical sensibility.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

> And there are theoretical limits to what you can do with lossless compression and I suspect that the algorithm in the show breaks those. Compression schemes achieve better results the more they're tailored to the data you're compressing. The theoretical limits are not the issue. For example, here's my compression algorithm for popular movies: You take the most popular 255 movies of all time as of a particular date and include an uncompressed copy of all of them within the compression algorithm itself. Then the compression scheme works as follows: If the first byte is not a zero, the decompression code will emit one of the 255 most popular movies, and the 255 possible non-zero values for the first byte identify which one. If the first byte is a zero, what follows is an uncompressed copy of a movie that is not one of the 255 most popular movies, and the decompression code merely strips the first byte. Using that algorithm I can compress each of the 255 most popular movies into a single byte. That's basically the theoretical limit. You could create a compression algorithm that could compress every film ever released into maybe three or four bytes. The problem is naturally that such an algorithm is a) completely useless for all the films that haven't been released before the algorithm is created, and b) completely impractical because the compression algorithm itself is far too large to be distributed or stored efficiently. Because it's a trade off, and achieving the theoretical limit for data size takes the trade off too far in the direction of specializing the algorithm to the data. But that doesn't mean there can't exist algorithms that make a more interesting trade-off than the existing ones do. Suppose you specifically design a compression algorithm for music. It's pre-programmed with the sounds made by common musical instruments and that are common in human singing. If the recording contains a guitar playing a G#, the algorithm identifies it as a guitar playing a G# and calculates the difference in pitch, volume, tempo, etc. between the recording and the idealized note built into the algorithm. That would be a significantly more complicated compression algorithm than most of those currently used, and it probably wouldn't get very good compression ratios for recordings of things other than music, but you would have something that could conceivably compress most music better than existing compression algorithms.

batmansbelt 13y ago
1. I think that's why they generally include the size of the decompressor in compression contests. 2. Great points re domain, but on the show they specifically say that the algorithm is general purpose, and the talk about using it for compressing images, documents, etc. I don't know about you, but I don't have any G#s in my excel spreadsheets. ;-)