Another slightly OT q...

[Gary Kline]

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 07:50:02PM +0200, Eduardo Morras wrote:
> At 23:22 08/05/2007, you wrote:
> 
> >he died / killed himself / was murdered before his hoax could be uncovered.
> 
> It's easily covered. Check usenet comp.compression faq. It's the "Counting Theorem". For a sequence of n-bits there are 2^n possible files (f.e. there are 256 files of 8 bits). Unfortunately there are only (2^n)-1 possible files lesser than the original (f.e. there are 128 files of 7 bits, 64 of 6, 32 of 5, 16 of 4, 8 of 3, 4 of 2 and 2 of 1 bits, total, 255 files) so using an algorithm you can't compress all n-bits sequences.
> 
> For this case, you can easily check that using this guy algorithm, you can have only 2^8192 movies. Perhaps you think they are a lot, but nearly all are white noise movies.
> 
> There are 1-2 monthly of this claims on comp.compression. Normally they are beginners to Information Theory / Compression but others are simply cheaters.
> 
> >sounds a lot like the perpetuum mobile stories.
> 
> In fact, it is. Information Theory uses entropy concept too and claims like this breaks the 2nd and 3rd principle.
> 

	Thanks for these tidbits of insight!  I figured there were some 
	laws or principles that told what the upper bound could be.  I've
	always been pretty good at math, but since Life is bounded, 
	I'll take your word for it :-)

	gary

	PS:  I'll check out the URL's in your last email.  They'll 
	     probably be overkill, but for reference........


-- 
  Gary Kline  kline at thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix