I wonder if it would have been possible to win the challenge legitimately?
If a randomly-generated file happened to contain some redundancy through sheer chance, you could hand-craft a compressor to take advantage of it. This compressor would not work in general for random data, but it could work for this one particular case.
It's a bet worth taking, because the payoff, 50:1 ($5,000 to $100), is pretty good. Play the game 50 times and you might get a file you could compress.
The challenge, then, would be for the person offering the bet to generate a really random file that contained no such redundancy. That might not be easy.
This seems to be an effective scissor: it nicely splits people into either strongly supporting Mike, or strongly supporting Patrick.
Whichever camp you fall into, the meta effect of the article on its readers is a show on its own. It doesn't take much for people to pick a side and start having choice words for the other team!
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...
That argument was made, and addressed in the emails. How are you defining compression? Actual compassion doesn't seem to have been a requirement in the challenge.
This is hilarious, but Mike’s behavior incenses me to no end. To switch the rules when fairly beaten is just so scummy!
Of course Patrick’s solution occurred to me immediately once he started talking about splitting up the file. :)
Then I got to wondering if it would be possible to compress a large enough file and save a few bytes, in the spirit of what Mike actually wanted. For instance, if you tried encrypting with a bunch of random keys, you’ll find some such that the result ends with n 0s (say), so then your result could be something like encrypted + key + n. Typically you’d expect to find that the length of the encryption key would be roughly the length of the number of 0s, so you wouldn’t actually net any savings. But I think if you searched long enough, you might “get lucky” and find a key that generated more 0s then the length of the key, so you could theoretically win the challenge. Of course you’d have to somehow embed a program which could decrypt and reassemble everything in a tiny amount of space, but it still doesn’t seem impossible like Mike seems to suggest. Perhaps just requires an intractable amount of computing power. :)
I’m not sure if any of that made sense. I think I’m using the wrong terms for things.
> It's not my fault that a file system uses up more space storing the same amount of data in two files rather than a single file.
It's not interesting to see people play word games with each other in the HN comments, so why is it interesting to see this kind of disingenuous behavior? Trolls have always existed. I don't get what's interesting about it.
I though he would try to net profit through probability by requesting to regenerate the file and hope to get a compressible one in at least 5000/100=50 times. (Though I don't think that would work.)
If a randomly-generated file happened to contain some redundancy through sheer chance, you could hand-craft a compressor to take advantage of it. This compressor would not work in general for random data, but it could work for this one particular case.
It's a bet worth taking, because the payoff, 50:1 ($5,000 to $100), is pretty good. Play the game 50 times and you might get a file you could compress.
The challenge, then, would be for the person offering the bet to generate a really random file that contained no such redundancy. That might not be easy.
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