Thread: Max. Compression that you have hard of?

>what would be the max. compression that you have heard of
100% compression:

Code:

#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main ( int argc, char *argv[] )
{
  if ( argc < 2 ) {
    cerr<<"usage: compress <filename>"<<endl;
    return EXIT_FAILURE;
  }

  if ( remove ( argv[1] ) != 0 )
    return EXIT_FAILURE;

  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

There are two kinds of compressions, lossy and lossless. If you compress using lossy compression there is no limit to how much you can compress your data (Prelude's example just throws the data away, which is 100% compression).
If you want to be able to recreate the exact data (lossless) the maximum compression depends entirely on the type of data. 100 GB of only zeroes can be compressed to a few bytes, but purely random data cannot be compressed at all.

http://maximumcompression.com/

EDIT

I was just doing some research and wondering what would be the max. compression that you have heard of. Just more curios then anything else.

On a less practical level, the maximum compression capable will converge on 100% for some data. Consider a run length encoder compressing a file containing a continous stream of millions of 'A' s

I hesitate to post this, because I have nothing to substantiate it. I heard about a researcher that "folded" the data through "multiple dimensions" or somesuch. (Not sure how the hell thats supposed to work )

Apparrantly he got VERY good results (so good that the telecommunications companies squashed the research - they were afraid of being put out of business by this technique).

This, of course, is just hearsay. But interesting, nonetheless!