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."

Comments

Re:It really works?

[phoenix_rizzen]

They're talking about the Score, not the compression algorithm. And your link doesn't mention anything about the Score.

Re:Bullshit....

[mrchaotica]

Can you explain in more detail?

If you have a multi-dimensional set of factors of things and you design a metric to collapse them down into a single dimension, what you're really measuring is a combination of the values of the factors and your weighting of them. Since the "correct" weighting is a matter of opinion and everybody's use-case is different, a single-dimension metric isn't very useful.

This goes for any situation where you're picking the "best" among a set of choices, not just for compression algorithms, by the way.

Like, if you're trying to compress a given file, and one algorithm compressed the file by 0.00001% in 14 seconds, another compressed the file 15% in 20 seconds, and the third compressed it 15.1% in 29 hours, then the middle algorithm is probably going to be the most useful one.

User A is trying to stream stuff that has to have latency less than 15 seconds, so for him the first algorithm is the best. User B is trying to shove the entire contents of Wikipedia into a disc to send on a space probe, so for him, the third algorithm is the best.

You gave a really extreme[ly contrived] example, so in that case you might be able to say that "reasonable" use cases would prefer the middle algorithm. But differences between actual algorithms would not be nearly so extreme.