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GZipping Life Forms: Deflate Reveals Bare-Bones
An anonymous reader writes "To distinguish images derived from living vs. non-living sources, USC and NASA JPL researchers report today using the standard gzip compression utility. As a measure of overall pattern complexity, they find that the inherent pixel content of biologically generated fossils produces higher image compression ratios [more data redundancy], compared to their non-biological counterparts. The more the file shrinks, the more likely it is that a living process was involved. A test is live online here. This extends the simple, but powerful, uses of gzip to biogenic fossil detectors, in addition to spam cop filters, DNA sequence comparisons, digital camera image crunchers, etc. In nine months, the two Mars rovers will send back the first microscopic-scale images of Mars rocks, which should be amenable to some of these same techniques: thus gzipping is apparently pretty zippy."
No more sniffing when i'm checking items in the refrigerator - is it 'alive' ? gzip is the answer!
That actually should flatter you. You have less entropy so you are of a higher order than the rock. You can brag to all your non-rock friends that those stupid rocks have high entropy.
at the comparison page attached to the article that lets you run the same test on images that the researchers tried. In a startling discovery that is sure to earn me a Nobel Prize for Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Marital Relations, I was told the following:
"Answer: Image 1 [the Mars image](1.43702451394759 % compression) has a higher complexity measure than image 2[the image of my wife] (0.773501341151519 % compression), and thus image 1 is more probably biogenic."
Not only does this prove that there was once life on Mars, but it also proves that my wife is some sort of robot. Further research will be undertaken pending receipt of my prize money.
Carousel is a lie!
The problem here is that your wife is wearing clothes. Clothes are man made.
If you send me a picture of your unclothed wife, I'll be happy to, uhm, test this theory.
I myself have successfully used gzip for factoring large prime numbers, sorting the men from the boys, unblocking the kitchen sink and cracking safes. I'm currently trying to locate Osama Bin Laden by compressing Al Jazeera footage, but all I come up with are reports of Elvis sightings.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets