How I Completed The $5000 Compression Challenge

Patrick Craig points to this page which details (in email) the strange life of an online challenge as posed, clarified and (at least to some eyes) met successfully. This should give pause to anyone willing to pose -- or accept -- seemingly impossible problems. In short, Patrick's not $5,000 richer, but you may think he deserves to be.

Comments

Re:That wasn't in the challenge

[Surak]

Again, that depends on what you mean by "paper airplane." Admittedly, I won a similar contest involving rubber-band driven cars. The contest rules said that CDs or DVDs could not be used for tires due to the fact that they make for very narrow tires, thus having reduced friction. So I used hard drive platters. :-)

Are you for lawyers or against?

[mjh]

I think that a person's stance on this issue, of who was right and who was wrong, will indicate that same person's approval of lawyers and much of the practice of the law today.

If you are for the challengee, then you believe that exact specificity is more important than intent. And you inadvertantly empower the legal profession to profit from being better able to specify rules, etc. Which, in turn, gives those with money even more power. They can write the rules by which your interaction with them will be governed. You can be certain that the rules will be written to the advantage of the guy with the money.

If, on the other hand, you are for the challenger, then you believe that his intent was more important. (Considering that the challenge came from the compression FAQ, the exact definition of "compression" should have not been vague. It seems clear to me that his intent was obvious, even though his challenge wasn't very specific.) Still there is a problem with valuing intent over specificity. That is it's easy to misrepresent intent after the fact. Thus the need to clearly specify our intentions prior to anything we do. That being the case, with accurate documentation, it seems possible to me that we can discern the original intent w/out having to specify everything legalistically. For example, I think that I was able to clearly determine the challenger's intent well after the fact, and I did this having read the challengee's representation of the events.

Now you may say, in rebuttal, "Who cares who I choose? I don't get to make the law." But think of yourself as the jury trying to determine to whom you would award the money. You may one day find yourself on a jury and trying to determine who should be awarded money. I see this as a microcosm of exactly how our court system has gotten into the state that it's in. Specificity is clearly more important than intent. And it's that way because juries award that way. Since juries are comprised of members of society, it's not a far stretch to say that society as a whole regards specificity as more important than intent.

Is there any chance that we can change this? And if we did, would it be better?

The page has been removed by GeoCities

[locutus074]

There is now a mirror available.

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Compression

[clare-ents]

Ok, I've done some information theory, I know it's impossible to create a perfect compressor. Boxes arguments and all that.

However, to make money, you don't have to.

All that is required is a compresser that saves 1 bit on better than 1 in 50 attempts.

For example, if we can save 1 bit on 50% of the attempts - even if the other 50% of the attempts results it catasrohpically large files. On average we've lost the compression war.

However, on 100 attempts, we've paid $100 x 100 or $10000 but we've won on half of these - netting us $250000 or a cool $240000 profit.

Anyone want to demonstrate this?

That wasn't in the challenge

[drew_kime]

If the guy had read the FAQ, he would know that such tricks are not compression

Did the rules as stated say that the solution had to comply with the principle laid out in the FAQ? Not that I can see. If you're going to pup up a $5,000 challenge, you damn well better post all the rules.

For instance: I had a friend who entered a paper airplane contest. He signed up for the "maximum distance" part. The only rules were that the contest organizers supplied the single piece of paper, you had five minutes to fold or tear it however you want to, and then everyone threw them at the same time. The one that stops moving farthest from the launch line wins.

He waited until 4:45 into the time, then crumpled the paper up into a ball and threw it. While everyone else's planes were circling lazily around, his went straight, landed, and rolled several more feet.

While you can debate all you want about whether his wad of paper counted as a "paper airplane" -- and we did debate (hey, it was college) -- he did saitsfy the rules of the contest. Had there been enough money on the line for someone to threaten legal action, I suspect he would have won.