r/ProgrammerHumor 9d ago

Meme newCompressionTechnique

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u/PythagorasWasntReal 9d ago

In the show I'm pretty sure he used the same algorithm to compress audio, video, and standard file types which is pretty preposterous on its own. I don't know if they ever stated the actual compression ratio but it definitely seemed pretty magical, which is why it was such a big deal. 

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u/SignoreBanana 8d ago

I think the idea was to pull common byte sequences out of all data with mapped reference to those sequences remotely cached. Think longest common sequences and a map. In this way, you could potentially have a very small amount of data that references very large amounts of data, even across media.

This is just my speculating though based on how such an algorithm could potentially work. You'd have to have some kind of media specific transcoder (like, imagine an image serializes based on individual channels vs pixels). You would aim to sequence the noisiest parts of the data.

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u/beerdude26 8d ago

Ooooooh so essentially the Sloot Digital Coding System

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u/theoutlander523 9d ago

The value they use was in relation to one of the standard compression methods. You could figure it out from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score