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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!
> So that tells me that life contains less data then non-life.
No, it means that life contain less noise than non-life.
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
This whole thing is slightly dodgy, and I begin to wonder whether it was released a day early by mistake.
The big problem is the use of JPEG source images. Unless you've stuck it up to the maximum size on quality, then the jpeg artifacting (which is in effect repeating blocks of image data after transitions) will probably mask any hidden level of complexity in the images - the human brain is a much better tool at pattern recognition than most computer algorithms (especially those algorithms not designed for the task!).
Throw high-resolution bitmap files at it, and I'd be more persuaded that there is a genuine effect. Until then, I suspect it's more of a happy coincidence that the files they've thrown at it give results they are excited about.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
doesnt bzip2 outperforms gzip ?
gzip might be preferable because it works more locally. It only keeps track of the last n bytes of data and does substitutions based on patterns seen in those n bytes.
bzip2 uses a markov predictor and the chain length is typically much longer than gzip uses, so the compression is less local. That's great if you're going for compression but for this work, it might be misleading.
That said, gzip doesn't know about image formats, so I wonder if these guys are getting some false positives on scanline wraps and other non-image data.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Unfortunately it's not that simple, inorganic systems can have as much visual complexity as organic things. For example.. um.. (looks out of window here in Toronto).. a snowflake! Fractal complexity, such as that seen in the branches of a tree, is frequently mirrored in the inorganic world - the snowflake is one example, another less well known example are manganese dendrites, they look just like fossil plants, but are totally inorganic such as these [Victoria Museum]. The patterns of frost on a frozen windscreen are another example. I can't see how a computer program can distinguish whether such complex patterns are signs of life or not. Still, if it helps NASA get more funding, then who am I to argue! Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com