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 This story has been submitted many times due to the astounding claims - Zeosync explicitly claims that they've superseded Claude Shannon's work.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".

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?)