4 ms·
> They said 100% compression was impossible? You're looking at it! If the offset within pi is so large that any representation of it is larger than my data?
by serge2k 12y ago
> They said 100% compression was impossible? You're looking at it!
If the offset within pi is so large that any representation of it is larger than my data?
- patio11 12y agoYep. Consider the minimum case: assume we've described a process for finding any bitstream we want in pi while necessarily saving at least one bit. Attempt to do so for the bitstreams 00, 01, 10, and 11. If we compress 2 bits to 1 bit, by the pigeonhole principle, at least one of 0 and 1 has to represent at least 2 distinct bitstreams, which means we have lost data. A similar argument works for all compression algorithms and all sizes. It is flatly impossible to compress all data all of the time.
- delinka 12y ago"It is flatly impossible to compress all data all of the time." Might I add "...such that the uncompressed data is recoverable." Pedantically speaking, any data passing through a cryptographic hash algorithm is being compressed.
- marvy 12y agoShush. You'll ruin it :)
- alixaxel 12y agoCase and point: http://pi.nersc.gov/cgi-bin/pi.cgi?word=alix&format=char http://pi.nersc.gov/cgi-bin/pi.cgi?word=alix&format=char strlen(alix) < strlen(1188606148)