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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: 0.204s | 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. nkrisc ◴[25 Nov 24 12:14 UTC] No.42235599[source]▶
If the challenge allowed for a decompressor + compressed file size as little as 1 byte less than the original file, was it ever really about compression then? If that’s not in the spirit of the competition, then why was it allowed by the competition?