1st International Longest Tweet Results

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.

Comments

Re:Looking at that entry

[Volguus Zildrohar]

You don't get it?

A weak, inexplicable imitation of earlier, better tech?

That's Twitter in a nutshell.

Erm ...

[daveime]

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.

Re:Looking at that entry

[Zocalo]

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.

16000bits

[M8e]

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!