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GZipping Life Forms: Deflate Reveals Bare-Bones

Posted by Hemos on from the getting-to-the-core-of-the-matter dept.

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."

8 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Lifeforms seem to be built on patterns afterall. Patterns are easily compressible.

    1. Re:Makes sense... by Ted_Green · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Of course, so do a lot of crystalized structures. Lots of things are built on patterns.

      Anyways as far as this technique is concered this (organic images being more compressable) only holds true for organicly created stromatolite structures vs. chemcialy created stromatolite-like structures.

      They've only done 20 images or so, I'd like to know the comparitive compression ratios.

  2. Thought this would be somewhat obvious... by ignoramus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Every one of us is incredibly redundant, and I don't just mean in our posts on slashdot!

    Simply consider that you can have a reasonably good duplicate of yourself, with only the DNA contained in a single cell!

    You may need most of your parts to be functional but, information-wise, it all comes down to 1 germ cell (say, a spermatozoid) and the aparatus needed to move it into proximity of another compatible germ cell ;)

  3. Re:Be Humble by javatips · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > So that tells me that life contains less data then non-life.

    No, it means that life contain less noise than non-life.

  4. Re:Biological clocks in unicorns... by archeopterix · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Similar thoughts here. From the article:
    So how does one separate the wheat from the chaff, the true stromatolites from the fakes?
    One method is to examine the suspect rock with a microscope, looking for visual evidence of microorganisms. But as researchers who study ancient terrestrial rocks- and one notorious Martian meteorite - have discovered, it isn't all that easy to tell, just by looking at shapes, whether or not a microscopic blob in a rock was once alive.
    So, what do they verify the gzip method against? Their guesses about the image origins? Does not look great from the methodology standpoint, eh?
  5. 42 by snarkh · · Score: 2, Insightful


    42 is one byte.

  6. Re:The fractal geometry of nature? by jeff_bond · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Could you give some examples of fractal structures in a human?

    For starters, how about the branching structure of the airways in your lungs?

    Jeff

    --
    stty erase ^H
  7. Pretty sloppy, you mean... by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There are other techniques for measuring the level of chaos in a set of data, and they'd probably yield more consistent results than running the data through an algorithm meant for an entirely different purpose.