Real Infinite Compression

http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/barf.html

Let me be the first to state the obvious, but infinite compression is impossible

Yes, I'd love to be able to decompress a 0 byte file.

I chuckled. Thanks, >>1.

>>2
I guess you haven't heard about FV's ingenious infinite compression algorithm?

>>5
You sure like reminding us.

Here's my algorithm!

The output of the compression algorithm is:

seed, time, description of data location

The seed is a seed that can contain all the states of the universe, it might have to be pretty large.  The seed is used to create a new universe from scratch.  The time is how long the universe should run, specified in seconds, might have to be pretty huge as well.  The description is a text describing where to find the actual compressed data in the universe.  In case this text does not make any sense to the current civilization, the universe is fast-forwarded until time travel is possible and someone manages to understand the description.

The finder of the data then prints it out and holds it up for me to see.

So, what does any of this really do?

>>7
A more localised (more efficient, yet perhaps detrimental to the effect of the joke) could be like so:

Compression output: Exact time of compression, exact location of uncompressed data
Decompression algorithm: Look up the compression time and location, and open a data wormhole to it. Transfer data through the wormhole.

>>9
Such an algorithm seems infeasible since we cannot open wormholes yet!  My algorithm needs only a way of simulating an universe, a rather simple task that is far below me.

>>10
It's quite feasible. However, efficiently implementing the wormhole-related parts of the algorithm is left as an exercise for the reader.

13 Name: Anonymous 2013-09-27 1:34