How Stanford Engineers Created a Fictitious Compression For HBO

Tekla Perry (3034735) writes Professor Tsachy Weissman and Ph.D student Vinith Misra came up with (almost) believable compression algorithms for HBO's Silicon Valley. Some constraints -- they had to seem plausible, look good when illustrated on a whiteboard, and work with the punchline, "middle out." Next season the engineers may encourage producers to tackle the challenge of local decodability.

Stanford as a buzzword factory

[hax4bux]

Now they can admit it.

Re:Meh

[hankwang]

"you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit."

That's why you need two distinct compression algorithms. Sometimes one will work better, sometimes the other. While repeatedly compressing, don't forget to write down in which sequence you need to apply the decompression. I believe this can compress abitrary data down to zero bits, if you are patient enough.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

You do the same thing you did the first time: two algorithms, write down the order. ;)

Re:Meh

[AYeomans]

Metadata? You just let the NSA store it for you.

Re:Meh

[serviscope_minor]

While repeatedly compressing, don't forget to write down in which sequence you need to apply the decompression.

Pretty much. I've found that I can do this. Essentially for N bits, I've got a large family (2^N) of compression algorithms. I pick the best one and write down it's number. The resulting data is 0 bits long, but there's a little metadata to store.