Compression of random binary data
Ben Bacarisse
ben.usenet at bsb.me.uk
Tue Oct 24 07:04:42 EDT 2017
Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> writes:
> On 24 October 2017 at 11:23, Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet at bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>> For example, run the complete works of Shakespeare through your program.
>> The result is very much not random data, but that's the sort of data
>> people want to compress. If you can compress the output of your
>> compressor you have made a good start. Of course what you really want
>> to be able to do is to compress the output that results from compressing
>> your compressed out. And, of course, you should not stop there. Since
>> you can compress *any* data (not just the boring random stuff) you can
>> keep going -- compressing the compressed output again and again until
>> you end up with a zero-length file.
>
> Oh, and just for fun, if you are able to guarantee compressing
> arbitrary data, then
It's a small point, but you are replying to a post of mine and saying
"you". That could make people think that /I/ am claiming to have a perfect
compression algorithm.
> 1. Take a document you want to compress.
> 2. Compress it using your magic algorithm. The result is smaller.
> 3. Compress the compressed data. The result is still smaller.
> 4. Repeat until you hit 0 bytes.
Isn't this just repeating what I said? I must has not written is
clearly enough.
<snip>
--
Ben.
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