--- Russell Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 10/4/07, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > And text is the only data type with this property. Images, audio, > executable > > code, and seismic data can all be compressed with very little memory. > > How sure are we of that? Of course all those things _can_ be > compressed with very little memory - so can text. In the case of text, > there are more memory-intensive algorithms that do a better job. Maybe > there are such algorithms for the other data types, that we just > haven't found yet?
I mean with respect to existing algorithms. When you plot compression ratio vs. memory required by various programs the curve is steep for text but not other data types. For lossless compression of images and audio the best compressors use fairly simple predictors based on neighboring samples. More sophisticated algorithms would squeeze out very little compared to all the incompressible noise, so nobody bothers. All the interesting research is in lossy compression. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=49588843-c56881
