ZeoSync Makes Claim of Compression Breakthrough

dsb42 writes: "Reuters is reporting that ZeoSync has announced a breakthrough in data compression that allows for 100:1 lossless compression of random data. If this is true, our bandwidth problems just got a lot smaller (or our streaming video just became a lot clearer)..." This story has been submitted many times due to the astounding claims - Zeosync explicitly claims that they've superseded Claude Shannon's work. The "technical description" from their website is less than impressive. I think the odds of this being true are slim to none, but here you go, math majors and EE's - something to liven up your drab dull existence today. Update: 01/08 13:18 GMT by M : I should include a link to their press release.

Comments

Some background reading:

[Quixote]

Section 1.9 of the comp.compression FAQ is good background reading on this stuff. In particular, read the "WEB story".

It's rare to see such a baldfaced scam

[Thagg]

I was wondering as I read the headline and summary on slashdot "how can these sleazeballs possibly promote this scam, because it would be easy to show counterexamples?" This shows, once again, that I lack the imagination and chutzpah of a real con artist.

The beauty of this scam is that zeospace claims that they can't even do it themselves, yet. They've only managed to compress very short strings. So, they can't be called to compress large random files because, well gosh, they just haven't gotten the big file compressor work yet. So, you can't prove that they are full of shit.

Beautiful flash animation, though. I particularly like the fact that clicking the 'skip intro' button does absolutely nothing -- you get the flash garbage anyway.

thad

Re:I think their investment model requires pigeons

[softsign]

I'm not sure if I understand your point, but from what I do understand, it seems to me you are missing it.

If you look at this sequence as a one-dimensional series: 00101101, it's pretty hard (at least for a processor) to distinguish a pattern there... it's a pseudo-random sequence. But if I paint it this way, in 2d: (0,0) (1,0) (1,1) (0,1), I can step back and see a square with sides of length one.

AFAIK, what these people are claiming is that they've developed a way to step WAY back, to n-dimensions, and have patterns emerge from seemingly random data.

It's not the random-number generation that's significant here... it's the purported ability to compress a seemingly random sequence. RLE typically doesn't fare very well with pure random data because it only looks for certain types of redundancy.

If I haven't missed the boat here, it's really a very interesting achievment.

Anyone remember the OWS hoax?

[wberry]

Back in 1991 or 1992, in the days of 2400 bps modems, MS-DOS 5.0, and BBS'es, a "radical new compression tool" called OWS made the rounds. It claimed to have been written by some guy in Japan and use breakthroughs in fractal compression, often achieving 99% compression! "Better than ARJ! Better than PKzip!" Of course all my friends and I downloaded it immediately. Now we can send gam^H^H^Hfiles to each other in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours!

Now I was in the ninth grade, and compression technology was a complete mystery to me then, so I suspected nothing at first. I installed it and read the docs. The commands and such were pretty much like PKzip. I promptly took one of my favorite ga^H^Hdirectories, *copied it to a different place*, compressed it, deleted it, and uncompressed it without problems. The compressed file was exactly 1024 bytes. Hmm, what a coincidence!

The output looked kind of funny though:
Compressing file abc.wad by 99%.
Compressing file cde.wad by 99%.
Compressing file start.bat by 99%.
etc. Wait, start.bat is only 10 characters, that's like one bit! And why is *every* file compressed by 99%? Oh well, must be a display bug.

So I called my friend and arranged to send him this g^Hfile via Zmodem, and it took only a few seconds. But he couldn't uncompress it on the other side. "Sector Not Found", he said. Oh well, try it again. Same result. Another bug.

So I decided that this wasn't working out and stopped using OWS. Their user interface needed some work anyway, plus I was a little suspicious of compression bugs. The evidence was right there for me to make the now-obvious conclusion, but it didn't hit me until a few *weeks* later when all the BBS sysops were posting bulletins warning that OWS was a hoax.

As it turns out, OWS was storing the FAT information in the compressed files, so that when people do reality checks it will appear to re-create the deleted files, as it did for me. But when they try to uncompress a file that actually isn't there or has had its FAT entries moved around, you get the "Sector Not Found" error and you're screwed. If I hadn't tried to send a compressed file to a friend I might have been duped into "compressing" and deleting half my software or more.

All in all, a pretty cruel but effective joke. If it happened today somebody would be in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Maybe it happened then too...

(Yes, this is slightly off-topic, but where else am I going to post this?)