Eric Cordian wrote:
Declan opines:
I'm naturally skeptical of this claim (until I can verify it for myself), but I do not believe the claim is "we can encode random data at 100:1."
From the article:
"ZeoSync said its scientific team had succeeded on a small scale in compressing random information sequences in such a way as to allow the same data to be compressed more than 100 times over -- with no data loss."
Now of course it's possible they were horribly misquoted. Still, it is worrisome that so many people quoted in the article think such algorithmic gymnastics are mathematically possible.
The overpowering stench of snake oil pervades the ether I particularly liked: "The techniques described by ZeoSync would mark a break with the dozens of existing compression technologies, including MPEG for video and music and JPEG for pictures and graphics are able to compact data at compression rates up to 10 times the original. These algorithms typically work by eliminating long strings of identifiable bits of data such as blue sky, green grass or the white background of a snow-covered landscape." Which sounds like someone who doesn't know what they are talking about being misreported by someone who doesn't understand (*) "ZeoSync said its scientific team had succeeded on a small scale" "The company's claims, which are yet to be demonstrated in any public forum" "ZeoSync, whose Web site can be located at http://www.zeosync.com/" "Among the scientific team working with ZeoSync is Steve Smale, one of America's most renowned mathematicians. Smale is an emeritus professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the 1966 winner of the Fields Prize, the Nobel Prize for researchers in this field. He could not be reached for comment on his role in the project." I bet. Ken Brown (*) clue for those who have too much of a life to bother with things like file structures and encoding (though why would they be reading cypherpunks?) - JPEG is a lossy compression method that tries to recode "real world" pictures in a way that *looks* almost as good as the real thing but takes up less space, by smoothing out gradual changes of colour (and other stuff as well). It doesn't "typically work by eliminating long strings of identifiable bits of data". And it doesn't compress "up to 10 times", it compresses as much as you like, with a trade-off between file size and image quality. MPEG, AFAIK, is similar.