Timeline for How much can you compress information?
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| Mar 5 at 8:04 | comment | added | Peter Cordes | @Hakaishin: "true entropy" (the smallest you can make something with optimal compression, including compression specific to that kind of data) is called Shannon Entropy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… . It's related to Kolmogorov complexity, which includes the size of the decompressor, i.e. smallest program that can print the result. Shannon was concerned with communication systems where the compressor / decompressor are used with an arbitrary amount of data so their size is negligible. | |
| Mar 4 at 16:03 | comment | added | Hakaishin | So many interesting comments to a seemingly simple question. The really interesting question is hidden as you say, knowing the true entropy of all human knowledge. You could have an insanely small generator, but if you let it run long enough it would produce the world as we know it. It's such a fascinating area of research and lends itself to beautiful sci-fi :) | |
| Mar 4 at 11:27 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | Finally an answer mentioning entropy. Another important point is specialized representations and lossy compressions (JPEG, MP4). A slight degree of acceptable loss -- nigh imperceptible -- may allow a specialized representation to make massive gains on compression ratios. | |
| Mar 3 at 4:19 | history | answered | Cort Ammon | CC BY-SA 4.0 |