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coolhand2120 4 days ago

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

The Sloot Digital Coding System is an alleged data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — which, if true, would dramatically disprove Shannon's source coding theorem, a widely accepted principle of information theory that predicts how much data compression of a digital file is mathematically possible. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen – 11 July 1999,[1] Nieuwegein), an electronics engineer from the Netherlands.[2] Several demonstrations of his coding system convinced high-profile investors to join his company, but a few days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified, and the playback device he used for demonstrations was found to have contained a hard disk drive, contrary to what he told investors.

carlnewton 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is really interesting thought. Could someone help me understand where I'm going wrong? Because I assume that Sloot made the same mistake that I'm making here, and I'm struggling to understand the Shannon's source code theorem article, so I'm thinking in practical terms:

If you wanted any movie in 1080x768, and wanted to have it in full colour, that would be 16,777,216 possible colours per pixel, so the number of IDs in your sequentially generated noise database would be 16777216 * 1024 * 768 = 1.319414e+13. This is where I think I might be misunderstanding something, because that number in decimal form is apparently 13194140000000, which means every frame will have an ID that is only 14 digits long.

Where have I made the mistake in concluding that I could store any 1024x768 image in 14 characters so long as my computer could generate an image of that ID?

Edit: I've just realised that 1024x768 is not a standard resolution, but I suppose the point remains with 1920x1080

erdosjr 3 days ago | parent [-]

There is a small mistake in the formula: the actual cardinality of the noise database would be 16777216 ^ (1024 * 768), which is a much bigger number.

carlnewton 3 days ago | parent [-]

Ah yes, the way I was thinking of it, I was only considering the variations of one pixel in each position of the image, not combined. Thanks!

interstice 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if this could be done with some kind of seed generation (as in minecraft), but it sounds like magical thinking to have a seed and generator anywhere near small enough to not just contain all the data anyway.

barnacl437 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

is this yet another tech hoax?

interstice 3 days ago | parent [-]

Dying is a pretty extreme length to go to for a hoax