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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: 0.21s | source
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benchmarkist ◴[24 Nov 24 00:08 UTC] No.42224932[source]▶
Take random bytes from /dev/urandom, encrypt it. There is no way any compressor can reduce the size of that file. I'm pretty sure there is no way the second player can win this game. Actually, the encryption part isn't even necessary. There is no compressor that can reduce the size of a random stream of bytes.
replies(3): >>42225052 #>>42225062 #>>42225454 #
1. quuxplusone ◴[24 Nov 24 02:14 UTC] No.42225454[source]▶
The encryption part might actually be harmful: for (silly) example, if you encrypt using the Bacon cipher, which turns every letter into five letters all of which are either "a" or "b". :) You'd need to pick an encryption method that doesn't expand the text at all, not even via a header or footer block. Better to stick with bytes generated uniformly at random, in which case you are correct.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_cipher