Slashdot Mirror
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 This story has been submitted many times due to the astounding claims - Zeosync explicitly claims that they've superseded Claude Shannon's work.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.
Pure random data is imposible to compress - If You compress 1Mb of random data (propper Random Data, not pseudo random).. and you get, say 100K's worth of compressed output; what's stopping you feading this 100K's worth back through the algorhythm, again and reduceing it down even more.... again, and again, untill the whole 1MB is squashed into a byte! (Which, obviously is a load of rubbish).....
That's not right. A 1:1 average for a large sample of random data is the best you can ever do. On a case by case basis, you can get lucky and do better, but no algorithm can compress arbitrary random data at better than 1:1 in the long run.
ZeoSync is not claiming to reduce random data 100-to-1. They are claiming to reduce "practically random" data 100-to-1, and Reuters appears to have misreported it. What "practically random" data should mean is data randomly selected from that used in practice. What ZeoSync may mean by "practically random" is data randomly selected from that used in their intended applications. So their press release is not mathematically impossible; it just means they've found a good way to remove more information redundancy in some data.
The proof that 100-to-1 compression of random data is impossible is so simple as to be trivial: There are 2^N files of length N bits. There are 2^(N/100) files of length N/100 bits. Clearly not all 2^N files can be compressed to length N/100.