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 This story has been submitted many times due to the astounding claims - Zeosync explicitly claims that they've superseded Claude Shannon's work.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

Why must you be so jealous Michael?

[Uttles]

...something to liven up your drab dull existence today.

Look, us Engineers and math types can't help it if we make more money than you CS and CIS people, it's just the way the world works. Go back to school and get a real degree.

Re:how can this be?

[sprag]

>With truly random data [random.org] there's no pattern to find, assuming you're looking at a large enough sample

How big is a 'large enough sample'? Seems the larger the sample, the more likelyhood of getting longer matches.

However, given 10 bytes from random.org: 39, 233, 196, 127, 220, 228, 10, 146, 60, 68.
Strung together as binary they come out as:

00100111 11101001 11000100 01111111 11011100 11100100 00001010 10010010 00111100 01000100

Lots of little patterns in there, providing you cross byte boundaries. 4 1's in a row happens 4 times. 3 zeroes in a row come up 7 times.'10' comes up 17 times. '100' comes up 12 times. '0100' comes up 8 times.

Can this be encoded in a way that takes less than 10 bytes? Don't know. Don't care really, but there are patterns in there.