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181 points ekiauhce | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.378s | source
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nojvek ◴[] No.42230025[source]
I’d take this bet.

> With this offer, you can tune your algorithm to my data.

One can generate a 1GB file or 10GB file. It is highly likely that there is some form of a repeatable pattern in there to shave off 50-100 bytes by sliding window search.

Then the decompressor is essentially - at this index, expand this pattern. The compressed file excludes the range of pattern.

One may not always get such a pattern, but on multiple tries it’s very feasible. Payout just needs one win in 50 tries.

You could generate a 100GB file. The bigger the file the higher the chance of repeating pattern.

The challenge is won if compressed_file + decompressor is less one byte than original file.

One could have a self executing decompressor to save some file overhead bytes.

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1. alt227 ◴[] No.42237324[source]
The whole point is Mike had control over creating the source file, and so obviously checked for random repeating patterns and removed them before giving the file to the challenger.

On top of this, it takes more data to store the address of the repeating byte pattern than the original pattern does. Therefore you are creating more data than you are saving.

If it was this easy then hundreds of people would have taken on the challenge and won the £5k.