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A Fictional Compression Metric Moves Into the Real World
Tekla Perry (3034735) writes The 'Weissman Score' — created for HBO's "Silicon Valley" to add dramatic flair to the show's race to build the best compression algorithm — creates a single score by considering both the compression ratio and the compression speed. While it was created for a TV show, it does really work, and it's quickly migrating into academia. Computer science and engineering students will begin to encounter the Weissman Score in the classroom this fall."
A "combined score" for speed and ratio is useless, as that relation is not linear.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The so-called Weissman score is just proportional to (compression ratio)/log(time to compress).
I guess the idea is that twice as much compression is always twice as good, while increases in time become less significant if you're already taking a long time. For example, taking a day to compress is much worse than taking an hour, but taking 24 days to compress is only somewhat worse than taking one day since you're talking offline/parallel processing anyway.
The log() seems kind of an arbitrary choice, but whatever. It's no better or worse than any other made-up metric, as long as you're not taking it too seriously.
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