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The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001)

(www.patrickcraig.co.uk)
181 points ekiauhce | 1 comments | 23 Nov 24 21:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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fxtentacle ◴[23 Nov 24 23:38 UTC] No.42224763[source]▶
This guy clearly failed because he didn't actually do any compression, he just ab-used the filesystem to store parts of the data and then tried to argue that metadata was not data...

But FYI someone else actually managed to compress that exact same data: https://jasp.net/tjnn/2018/1.xhtml

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1. Timwi ◴[24 Nov 24 02:05 UTC] No.42225431[source]▶
He clearly failed at doing any actual compression, but he did not fail at the challenge. He satisfied every single condition.

He obviously knows that. He knows exactly what compression is and that his solution is not it. He showed (successfully) that meeting the challenge as it was worded did not require compression, which the setter of the challenge didn't realize.