this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
164 points (97.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43761 readers
1150 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is not that complicated, to make a simple example with strings: AAAABBBABABAB takes up 13 spaces, but write (compress) it like 4A3B3AB take up 6 spaces compressing it more than 50%.
Now double it like AAAABBBABABABAAAABBBABABAB with 26 spaces and write it as 2(4A3B3AB) with 9 spaces it takes only 30% of the space.
Compression algorithms just look for those repetitive spaces.
Takes those letters and imagine them being colored pixels of a picture to compress a picture
Once you get into audio, images and video it revolves a lot around converting temporal and/or positional data into the frequency domain rather than simple token replacement.
Wait, isn't your first example goes from 13 spaces binary to a 6 spaces of base 12 (base 10 + the two values A or B).
That would make the "compressed" result be 110111010111011101110011 which is larger than the original message when both are in binary...
Don't overthink my example, it was just a representation
Fair enough. The general idea is correct, I just found that example rather jarring... It is generally more difficult to compress an already small amount of data anyway.