4 ms·
There are 4.7 bits per character for Latin text, which means the comment would have 853 bytes of uncompressed information. Estimates of information density for
by sago 12y ago
There are 4.7 bits per character for Latin text, which means the comment would have 853 bytes of uncompressed information.
Estimates of information density for English are as low as 1.5 bits per character, giving 272 bytes in that comment.
The information density in machine code isn't 1 bits per bit though, because of the distribution of which opcodes are used, so the 672 would also drop.
So I think the analogy is a pretty good one, whether exact or not, some of the comments on this page contain more information than ZX81 chess.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago> Estimates of information density for English are as low as 1.5 bits per character Can you expand on that?
- sago 12y agoI'm not an information scientist, so this maybe a lay understanding, but as I understand it there is a limit to how much you could theoretically compress any piece of content without losing information. So take that 4.7 bits per character: well, not every letter is equally likely, so we could construct an encoding which takes frequency into account, but then not every word is equally likely, so we could use that information to make a tighter encoding, and so on. At some point we would reach a theoretical minimum. At that limit, the size of the compressed data has one bit per bit of information. So, scaling back up, the estimate is (and it has to be an estimate, I guess, since we can't construct the actual theoretically smallest encoding) 1.5 bits of information per character. I searched for this value, and didn't spend long figuring out if it was well calculated, so take it with a big googly pinch of salt.