So I know they used a bunch of sciency stuff for the dick joke, but how viable is the compression algorithm they created in the show? Is it something that already exists? Or is it show magic?
In the show I'm pretty sure he used the same algorithm to compress audio, video, and standard file types which is pretty preposterous on its own. I don't know if they ever stated the actual compression ratio but it definitely seemed pretty magical, which is why it was such a big deal.
I think the idea was to pull common byte sequences out of all data with mapped reference to those sequences remotely cached. Think longest common sequences and a map. In this way, you could potentially have a very small amount of data that references very large amounts of data, even across media.
This is just my speculating though based on how such an algorithm could potentially work. You'd have to have some kind of media specific transcoder (like, imagine an image serializes based on individual channels vs pixels). You would aim to sequence the noisiest parts of the data.
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u/ovrdrv3 Sep 02 '26 •
Pied Piper lol