was this shit real?
>The Sloot Digital Coding System was a data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — violating Shannon's source coding theorem by many orders of magnitude. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot, a Dutch electronics engineer
>In 1999, just days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, and the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
I can compress an entire word into just one letter!
N
Dude was able to compress every movie that ever existed, or ever will exist, into his noggin. Look at that heckin' five-head!
>died suddenly
waxxed?
I can teach you how to compress a program of any size down to a 1KB file. Even 100GB games.
You can then move that file anywhere on the computer and you'll see that the program still launches and works correctly.
The incredibly low one-time fee of $1000 can bring you this extraordinary knowledge. Hurry up, limited offer!
>shortcuts
I remember plan9 or one of those having some weird compression with the iso where the small file exploded into a huge file when uncompressed and I remember being surprised though not sure what happened
>I remember being surprised though not sure what happened
Likely sparse files. It's trivial to compress 800mb of zeroes.
scam
here's the full feature film i 40 bytes
7cb068a28cdf62624ad7850d08f99ec0ade17220
bee movie
see, it works?
It was as real as Nicolas Dupont's compression scam.
>sloot
jej
(OP)
That's not how Shannon's source coding theorem works.
You can trivially encode 2^8^8000 movies in 8 kilobytes of data; simply bundle the movies with the decoder spec and allocate one value for each movie.
Shannon merely proved that if you want to store more than 2^8^8000 possible movies (with uniform probability), the encoded data will be longer than 8kB on average.
I can do this too. Hell, I'll compress it down to 1 kb
But I can't guarantee it'll be lossless :^)
sounds like a scam
What I think happened
>sloot (kek) is too full of himself and thinks he's made an impossible breakthrough
>pitches the idea to clueless investors
>investors don't know anything about tech, they buy into it and agree to give him some money
>glownaggers hear about it, deem the tech potentially dangerous if it happened to work
>kill him, steal the floppy with the source code
even if it didn't work, the risk may have been deemed too large, and knowing how clueless boomers were about tech they may have believed it could work
An even better version exists.
https://github.com/philipl/pifs
guy probably lost his mind on speed and managed to con an investor into believing in him before the heart attack kicked in. if i understand correctly speed was big in the netherlands in the 90s
LDM
No, there are provable limits to compression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%27s_source_coding_theorem?useskin=vector
>It is not about compression. Everyone is mistaken about that. The principle can be compared with a concept as Adobe-postscript, where sender and receiver know what kind of data recipes can be transferred, without the data itself actually being sent."
Oh, so its a perceptual hash. It's nothing burgers.
That's how lossy compression works in general.
Jpg is just a bunch of wavelet "recipes" and the data is encoded as their weights.
Yes, perceptual hashes are almost always DCTs.
But once you talk about lossy, the shannon limit no longer matters, nor is compression ratio on it's own impressive in the least. Here's how I can compress an entire movie into one bit: Average every single pixel in the video into one float in linear space, normalize it, and then round to nearest whole number. To decompress, either show a black or a white frame for the entire movie. Without comparing it against error of the source, compression ratio of lossy algos. is a worthless metric.
So again, it's nothing burgers.
My former cofounder used to be obsessed with this guy and his project.
This is the quote he thought was most significant.
His argument was that SDCS wasn't a compression algo, but basically just a fancy programming language for media. You're not trying to perfectly replicate an existing media file, you're trying to programmatically/procedurally generate something close enough from a specification. If you wanted to do a slide show for example, you might just describe text/images and where/when they show up on the screen. If you wanted to do a film, you'd probably be restricted to just animation using whatever stock textures/models were provided or could be created from what was provided, with a script describing animation.
It's worth noting that digging into Sloot's history, the software he was keeping so secret was almost always described as a compiler, not as a compressor.
>it's just kungpow.webm
>zero bit files
>O(1) encoding type
>O(1) encoding space
Dare I say based.
Makes me think about the tech today. If I put a prompt into an AI program which will generate a movie from that prompt and will somehow always generate a specific identical movie every time from that exact prompt then the file size only has to be the size of the prompt right?
You then need to run another analysis to determine what that prompt would be exactly?
While we are at it we should also work out the random seed number for this universe too.
Problem is that your movie has to be created by an AI to begin with, since finding the prompt that produces a given movie is not easy.
The more common trick is to take an autoencoder and treat the intermediate encoding as a compressed file. Works pretty good for images.
Probably a combination of a guy thinking he was genuinely on to something, and clueless investors.
This happens in the "free energy" field over and over. A guy with a borderline theory thinks he has genuinely defied the laws of physics, he just needs more money to actually build it. He convinces investors who have never studied basic thermodynamics, sometimes through a rigged "demo". If caught in the act, he explains the cheating with "almost" having solved the problem, he just needs money (from the successful "demo") to ACTUALLY build the REAL thing.
It's rarely a dishonest scammer, more of a stubborn schizo refusing to admit he's wrong. Could very well have been the case here, and he died of a genuine heart attack. Or he an heroed when he realized he was wrong and couldn't bear the shame.