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1st International Longest Tweet Results

Posted by timothy on from the sewn-up-by-mockingbirds dept.

Dr_Evil6_6_6 writes "Slashdot had a story about the 1st International Longest Tweet Contest last month, and the winners have just been announced." The winner is impressive.

11 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Looking at that entry by SpazmodeusG · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't get it.
    If they ask what can be arbitrarily stored in the 4339bits available then there you can store 4339 arbitrary bits. It's a rule of compression. If they are asking for an English language compression program there are plenty better out there. Also if the goal is compression of English text and they aren't including the program size in the tweet then the competition can easily be cheated using a dictionary in the program that can be looked up.

    At the winner it's not a particularly good compression algorithm. It doesn't even seem to take bayesian probability of characters into account. I can't see any arithmetic coding (mathematically the perfect entropy encoder) either.

    1. Re:Looking at that entry by Thiez · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It is superior to the other algorithms that entered the competition. I find it interesting that the TFA doesn't mention how many submissions were made.

    2. Re:Looking at that entry by Volguus+Zildrohar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You don't get it?

      A weak, inexplicable imitation of earlier, better tech?

      That's Twitter in a nutshell.

      --
      When confronted with one problem, some think "I'll use recursion". Now they are confronted with one problem.
    3. Re:Looking at that entry by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Informative
      It does what is required of the competition. There are 2^4339 available bits in a valid tweet so the first algorithm takes any 2^4339 bit sequence and converts it into a valid tweet, the second converts it back again. What is missing is the means for generating that 2^4339 bit value and converting it back into the original content.

      4339 bits is 542 bytes plus three spare bits, so if you wanted to actually use this for something you could use those three bits to define your data format from one of eight types, then "attach" your data payload to the header to generate the sequence of 4339 bits. Some ideas for the payload would be:
      • A sequence of 542 8bit characters
      • A sequence of 619 7bit characters + 3 padding bits
      • A sequence of 722 6bit characters + 4 padding bits
      • A Zip file equal to, or smaller than, 542 bytes
      • A GZip file equal to, or smaller than, 542 bytes
      • etc.
      • If using compressed files, you'd also need some way of dealing with spare bytes in the payload; either a decompressor that can ignore extra characters at the end of the file or a compressor that can manipulate the file to equal 542 bytes - using the comments field of the archive, perhaps.
      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
    4. Re:Looking at that entry by Zocalo · · Score: 2, Informative

      Doh! That should be just "4339 bits" and not "2^4339 bits" which is a somewhat larger value, to put it mildly... I think you could theoretically describe a snapshot of the state of the entire universes in 2^4339 bits, and probably do so several times over as well, let alone the entire Internet. :)

      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  2. Erm ... by daveime · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Except for the fact the algorithms he has submitted have NOTHING to do with compression, and are just a method of mapping the 4339 bits into the allowable Unicode character set over 140 x 32 bit character "slots", i.e. encoding / decoding only.

    With 4339 bits, hell in theory the longest actual tweet you could make is 2^4339 of any single character you choose, using the 4339 bits just to represent a (very large) counter of how many times to repeat the character.

    Considering that 2^4339 is approximately 10^1305, and there are probably only 10^82 atoms in the whole universe, that's one bloody long tweet.

    1. Re:Erm ... by zarzu · · Score: 2, Insightful

      yes, but there is no trick to mapping to 4339 characters, it's simply the thing you will be doing if you want the most arbitrary bits transmitted. it's like a contest to paint a car: you have a fixed size car with a known surface area and the target of the contest is to paint the biggest surface. now you can either simply paint the whole surface and you will have won or you're gonna do some crazy pattern painting that totally misses the point. now tell me why did we just have this painting contest?

    2. Re:Erm ... by pjt33 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, but that's not what GPP was talking about. Why on Earth would you assume that comments on /. would be on-topic, when that would require reading TFS? ;)

  3. Re:The winner is impressive. by SpazmodeusG · · Score: 2, Informative

    For those wondering of a better way.

    for( i = 4339; i > 0; i-=31) {
        output((wxchar)(bigInt & 0xef)); //output lowest 31bits of our 4339bit block of data
        bigInt = bigInt >> 31; // Shift down
    }

    Reverse

    while( curInput = input() ) {
        bigInt += curInput; // add the 31 bits to the current bitInt
        bigInt = bigInt 31; // Shift up
    }

  4. Limits by kiehlster · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ah, so someone has finally determined the absolute breadth of the Twittersphere. If the world ran on tweets, maybe we wouldn't ever need more than 64kB of memory.

  5. 16000bits by M8e · · Score: 4, Funny

    Solution - Just tweet the following picture of a swimming fish:

    ".`.`..`.>"

    Given that 1 word is 16 bits, and a picture is equal to 1,000 words,
    that makes my above tweet 16,000 bits of information (fitting
    several pictures in a tweet may extend this further) :-)

    (.)(.)

    (.Y.)

    d^_^b

    48000bits!