9 ms·

The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)

33 points by rvschuilenburg 12y ago

kstrauser 12y ago
TL;DR "Perfect infinite compression is impossible, but we're calling our perfect infinite compression scheme something different so that doesn’t count." And this was backed by a comp sci professor. The only explanation I can see is that greed can blind people to anything they don't want to see.
- t__r 12y ago
  Pieper was not a comp sci professor. He was a professor of eCommerce. I followed some of his lectures during my CS master. The sloot story caused quite some giggles among us students. It was obviously bullshit. But nobody had the guts to ask him about it during these lectures.
  - kstrauser 12y ago
    I'll take your word for it, but the article explicitly says he was.
    - ggchappell 12y ago
      The article stretches the definition of "computer science professor" a bit too much. Pieper has a Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper]. It describes him as primarily an "IT-Entrepreneur". He seems to be mostly an investor/business type. And (from the WP article): > On 1 September 1999 Pieper was appointed as a professor of Electronic Commerce, a newly created chair at the faculty of informatics and technology management of the University of Twente. Pieper ended as a professor of business administration and corporate governance at the university of Twente in 2013.
toolslive 12y ago
Rumor has it he was murdered, either by investors who discovered it didn't work or either by 'the industry'.
- Rygu 12y ago
  I wonder where the investment money ("millions") went. Knowing that, probably means knowing the truth.
MrQuincle 12y ago
The concatenation of the numbers wouldn't work. How would you know which part of the huge floating point number would correspond to a book? It would make more sense to just create a large book by concatenating the pages. And then make the large number at once. In that case you only don't know which pages belong to which book, but separating on that level will probably be easier. :-)
- gwern 12y ago
  > The concatenation of the numbers wouldn't work. How would you know which part of the huge floating point number would correspond to a book? The same way any archive tool like 'tar' knows where one file stops and another begins in a bitstream.
  - MrQuincle 12y ago
    You mean you have to include a header before each book? And pad it with zeros? That wasn't in the concatenation manual. :-)
tumes 12y ago
Sooo pretty much Borges' Library of Babel. http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/library_of_babel.html http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/library_of_babel.html
compbio 12y ago
An incredibly fascinating story. Tom Perkins: "Mister Sloot, you have done an unbelievable job. You are going to be the richest man on earth." A TV-repair man working for over 20 years as a recluse in his attic. When his invention was ready for demo's, Roel Pieper was one of the first to take a look at it. He almost fell out of his chair and said "This is it!" when the device showed 16 movies running at different speeds. He quit his job at Philips later that week to form a company around the invention of Sloot. Had Jan Sloot really found a new and novel way to store information, beating Shannon's law? Vector graphics? Pre-storing the code book? Or was that only the hook to get as much investors behind it and make a few really really rich? I think the system was entirely within information theory laws. To see this, we look at a former invention of Sloot. As a TV-repair man he had to buy the schematics for the TV's he was working on. These schematics came on a CD or floppy disk. Sloot patented a device that had all the schematics of every TV already on it in a heavily compressed form. To "unlock" a schematic, one could call a phone number and receive a small keycode that one would enter. This would remove all the hassle of individual data carriers like CD's and floppies, which was a huge market at the time. I believe the Sloot Digital Coding System was to be a setup-box for media and software. A commercial PirateBay of sorts. You would download (or bring in your device to a local shop) encrypted versions of the latest software and movies. Then you could simply call a number or buy a chip card to unlock a movie you wanted to see. A CD-I Netflix 10 years before Netflix. This would have made the DVD market redundant. Like a Dolby Surround chip build into all sorts of electronics, so would this technology be licensed to other manufacturers. The only (and very big) problem was that Jan Sloot did not get to really finish his update-code. How to efficiently and automatically update the database of these devices? A team could have probably worked around it, but Jan Sloot kept to himself and was enormously paranoid. He did not allow Faraday cage tests to rule out suitcase transmitters. He claimed they could be used to reverse engineer his simple invention. The source-code for the device was never found. In the locker that PI's expected it to be, they found a John Grisham novel, and the only device ever opened after Sloot's death, contained a simple harddrive. Jan Sloot's attic room was cleaned the day after he died. All his papers, chips and devices were taken. The widow of Jan Sloot and her son have no clue were it went.
- nkurz 12y ago
  I think the system was entirely within information theory laws. Why do you believe this? The argument that 2^1024 is a very large number, but that the number of possible movies is larger than this strikes me as fairly compelling. To see this, we look at a former invention of Sloot. ... Sloot patented a device that had all the schematics of every TV already on it in a heavily compressed form. This would seem to involve compressing PDF of the schematics, and then encrypting each with a password that is specific to the disk and the schematic. Positing the existence of a secure database that keeps track of which password works for each document on each user's disk, and assuming that the total size of the compressed documents doesn't exceed the capacity of the disk, this seems plausible. But I don't why this would have us believe in the infinite movie device. Secondly, why would patent status of this earlier device encourage us to believe in a second purported invention that most (all?) experts in the field believe to be impossible? Are the patent examiners greater authorities than the experts? Even if the second invention itself was patented, this would influence me less than the fact that he secured multiple investors who parted with real money --- which I think is an interesting point in Sloot's favor, but one that can explained by human psychology and greed. Since you have a new account, my first presumption was that you were trolling, which I'd define as pretending to believe an untenable position to see if you can get a rise out of others. But degree of detail and excitement in this and your couple earlier comments makes me doubt this, and think instead that you believe what you say. Without trying to be too offensive, who are you, and why did you write this comment?
drv 12y ago
The "Sloot Digital Coding System" is clearly hokum, but the "alien's stick" story is more or less the same as arithmetic coding - except instead of a notch on a stick, the fraction is stored as a sequence of bits, so it's not magically infinite precision.
tluyben2 12y ago
Just after this happened, my company (in the Netherlands) got at least 5 calls I know of of people who claimed to have the Sloot secret. One of them I hope I saved from personal doom after he walked into our office to see if we were good enough to create his software; he was planning on taking a second mortgage on his house and quitting his job for a very bad idea. A lot of people (exclusively non programmers) got swallowed up by the romantic idea of changing the world with this idea which disappeared somewhere and so must be retrievable again with enough thinking. And the direction was given by Sloot; the aforementioned (the only one I personally talked to) person read book 'De Broncode' (the sourcecode) 100s of times, going over every page with a tooth comb in order to distill the idea he finally thought was the actual algorithm. I know several people as well who invested in assorted misguided individuals who said they recreated 'the code'. Our office was in Nieuwegein (where Sloot lived (and died)) which probably made it quite a bit 'hotter' in that neighbourhood than elsewhere, but it was definitely interesting.

TL;DR "Perfect infinite compression is impossible, but we're calling our perfect infinite compression scheme something different so that doesn’t count." And this was backed by a comp sci professor. The only explanation I can see is that greed can blind people to anything they don't want to see.

t__r 12y ago
Pieper was not a comp sci professor. He was a professor of eCommerce. I followed some of his lectures during my CS master. The sloot story caused quite some giggles among us students. It was obviously bullshit. But nobody had the guts to ask him about it during these lectures.
- kstrauser 12y ago
  I'll take your word for it, but the article explicitly says he was.
  - ggchappell 12y ago
    The article stretches the definition of "computer science professor" a bit too much. Pieper has a Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper]. It describes him as primarily an "IT-Entrepreneur". He seems to be mostly an investor/business type. And (from the WP article): > On 1 September 1999 Pieper was appointed as a professor of Electronic Commerce, a newly created chair at the faculty of informatics and technology management of the University of Twente. Pieper ended as a professor of business administration and corporate governance at the university of Twente in 2013.

toolslive 12y ago

Rumor has it he was murdered, either by investors who discovered it didn't work or either by 'the industry'.

Rygu 12y ago
I wonder where the investment money ("millions") went. Knowing that, probably means knowing the truth.

MrQuincle 12y ago

The concatenation of the numbers wouldn't work. How would you know which part of the huge floating point number would correspond to a book? It would make more sense to just create a large book by concatenating the pages. And then make the large number at once. In that case you only don't know which pages belong to which book, but separating on that level will probably be easier. :-)

gwern 12y ago
> The concatenation of the numbers wouldn't work. How would you know which part of the huge floating point number would correspond to a book? The same way any archive tool like 'tar' knows where one file stops and another begins in a bitstream.
- MrQuincle 12y ago
  You mean you have to include a header before each book? And pad it with zeros? That wasn't in the concatenation manual. :-)

tumes 12y ago

Sooo pretty much Borges' Library of Babel. http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/library_of_babel.html http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/library_of_babel.html

compbio 12y ago

An incredibly fascinating story. Tom Perkins: "Mister Sloot, you have done an unbelievable job. You are going to be the richest man on earth." A TV-repair man working for over 20 years as a recluse in his attic. When his invention was ready for demo's, Roel Pieper was one of the first to take a look at it. He almost fell out of his chair and said "This is it!" when the device showed 16 movies running at different speeds. He quit his job at Philips later that week to form a company around the invention of Sloot. Had Jan Sloot really found a new and novel way to store information, beating Shannon's law? Vector graphics? Pre-storing the code book? Or was that only the hook to get as much investors behind it and make a few really really rich? I think the system was entirely within information theory laws. To see this, we look at a former invention of Sloot. As a TV-repair man he had to buy the schematics for the TV's he was working on. These schematics came on a CD or floppy disk. Sloot patented a device that had all the schematics of every TV already on it in a heavily compressed form. To "unlock" a schematic, one could call a phone number and receive a small keycode that one would enter. This would remove all the hassle of individual data carriers like CD's and floppies, which was a huge market at the time. I believe the Sloot Digital Coding System was to be a setup-box for media and software. A commercial PirateBay of sorts. You would download (or bring in your device to a local shop) encrypted versions of the latest software and movies. Then you could simply call a number or buy a chip card to unlock a movie you wanted to see. A CD-I Netflix 10 years before Netflix. This would have made the DVD market redundant. Like a Dolby Surround chip build into all sorts of electronics, so would this technology be licensed to other manufacturers. The only (and very big) problem was that Jan Sloot did not get to really finish his update-code. How to efficiently and automatically update the database of these devices? A team could have probably worked around it, but Jan Sloot kept to himself and was enormously paranoid. He did not allow Faraday cage tests to rule out suitcase transmitters. He claimed they could be used to reverse engineer his simple invention. The source-code for the device was never found. In the locker that PI's expected it to be, they found a John Grisham novel, and the only device ever opened after Sloot's death, contained a simple harddrive. Jan Sloot's attic room was cleaned the day after he died. All his papers, chips and devices were taken. The widow of Jan Sloot and her son have no clue were it went.

nkurz 12y ago
I think the system was entirely within information theory laws. Why do you believe this? The argument that 2^1024 is a very large number, but that the number of possible movies is larger than this strikes me as fairly compelling. To see this, we look at a former invention of Sloot. ... Sloot patented a device that had all the schematics of every TV already on it in a heavily compressed form. This would seem to involve compressing PDF of the schematics, and then encrypting each with a password that is specific to the disk and the schematic. Positing the existence of a secure database that keeps track of which password works for each document on each user's disk, and assuming that the total size of the compressed documents doesn't exceed the capacity of the disk, this seems plausible. But I don't why this would have us believe in the infinite movie device. Secondly, why would patent status of this earlier device encourage us to believe in a second purported invention that most (all?) experts in the field believe to be impossible? Are the patent examiners greater authorities than the experts? Even if the second invention itself was patented, this would influence me less than the fact that he secured multiple investors who parted with real money --- which I think is an interesting point in Sloot's favor, but one that can explained by human psychology and greed. Since you have a new account, my first presumption was that you were trolling, which I'd define as pretending to believe an untenable position to see if you can get a rise out of others. But degree of detail and excitement in this and your couple earlier comments makes me doubt this, and think instead that you believe what you say. Without trying to be too offensive, who are you, and why did you write this comment?

drv 12y ago

The "Sloot Digital Coding System" is clearly hokum, but the "alien's stick" story is more or less the same as arithmetic coding - except instead of a notch on a stick, the fraction is stored as a sequence of bits, so it's not magically infinite precision.

tluyben2 12y ago

Just after this happened, my company (in the Netherlands) got at least 5 calls I know of of people who claimed to have the Sloot secret. One of them I hope I saved from personal doom after he walked into our office to see if we were good enough to create his software; he was planning on taking a second mortgage on his house and quitting his job for a very bad idea. A lot of people (exclusively non programmers) got swallowed up by the romantic idea of changing the world with this idea which disappeared somewhere and so must be retrievable again with enough thinking. And the direction was given by Sloot; the aforementioned (the only one I personally talked to) person read book 'De Broncode' (the sourcecode) 100s of times, going over every page with a tooth comb in order to distill the idea he finally thought was the actual algorithm. I know several people as well who invested in assorted misguided individuals who said they recreated 'the code'. Our office was in Nieuwegein (where Sloot lived (and died)) which probably made it quite a bit 'hotter' in that neighbourhood than elsewhere, but it was definitely interesting.