41–50 of 55 posts
https://sound.media.mit.edu/resources/mpeg4/sa-tools.html
It was a growing idea in the mid-2000s but AFAIK it has gone absolutely nowhere. Essentially, instead of somehow encoding the audio, you encode a description of how to generate the audio.
I once had an idea for a file transfer system based on digits of pi that sounds the same as this idea. You'd give everybody DVDs of digits of pi (or they could calculate them themselves) , and then transfer files faster by just sending them the offset into pi. At the time I thought it could work with a big enough bank of digits of PI on both sides. If transfer was expensive, and calculating digits was cheap then you…
You first have to prove that pi contains all possible finite substrings, which I believe is still an open problem.
Although a flat memory space / full file approach would be nice, I wonder if a paging scheme would be possible?
Where you would only need all possible finite strings of length N, where N would ideally be the max page size of RAM, but could be less if the substring could not be found within a reasonable offset...
Ignoring compression speed, I suspect it'd have a practical limitation where using a maximum offset would mean that some strings wouldn't be as big as the cell needed to describe them. That's usually the gotcha in schemes like this...
In order to entertain this, I think all possible 12 byte strings (64bit offset + 32bit size) would need to be found within whatever a reasonable amount of storage is.
I suppose the computational challenge is "How big an offset is required to have all possible strings of length N?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't take much magic to convince certain pointy haired bosses.
Very true... But from what I remember, he demoed for a bunch of research teams as well, which would require a bit more sleight of hand than fooling the average venture capitalist gambling other people's money. In any case, it's one of those crazy stories.
Weird, I once read about Roel Pieper, completely randomly, in a trade magazine for Unix that I think had very few issues. He had just become head of Unix Systems Laboratories. I don't know why that article stuck with me for so long. I didn't know he was also a professor, I thought he was just an exec. Turns out he was professor of business, not computer science, though his original university education was in CS.
Aside, I wonder if "Pied Piper" from the Silicon Valley series is a reference to him. Probably not but fun to entertain.
At least one of the ideas alluded to in this article is reminiscent of an actual audio "compression" algorithm. SAOL aka "MPEG-4 Structured Audio" https://sound.media.mit.edu/resources/mpeg4/sa-tools.html It was a growing idea in the mid-2000s but AFAIK it has gone absolutely nowhere. Essentially, instead of somehow encoding the audio, you encode a description of how to generate the audio.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've thought about this a lot over the years. What you're asking is, can we accurately emulate our own universe inside our own universe at greater than 100% speed? If so, it would allow us to build a type of space-time machine where we could visit any location at any time. I don't think it is totally inconceivable. It is definitely possible that there are hacks such as compression that would allow a simulator to run…
Quantum mechanics makes this impossible. This would require to know the position and speed of each particle precisely and that is in violation of the Heisenberg principle.
If the universe is based on some solid deterministic rules with a fixed seed value, then it would work.
Quantum events appear non-deterministic, but that might just be because we don't have all the answers right now.
Weird, I once read about Roel Pieper, completely randomly, in a trade magazine for Unix that I think had very few issues. He had just become head of Unix Systems Laboratories. I don't know why that article stuck with me for so long. I didn't know he was also a professor, I thought he was just an exec. Turns out he was professor of business, not computer science, though his original university education was in CS.
Yes, it's unclear how much theory he knew. Looks like next to nothing. Aside, I wonder if "Pied Piper" from the Silicon Valley series is a reference to him. Probably not but fun to entertain.
Weird, I once read about Roel Pieper, completely randomly, in a trade magazine for Unix that I think had very few issues. He had just become head of Unix Systems Laboratories. I don't know why that article stuck with me for so long. I didn't know he was also a professor, I thought he was just an exec. Turns out he was professor of business, not computer science, though his original university education was in CS.
Yes, it's unclear how much theory he knew. Looks like next to nothing. Aside, I wonder if "Pied Piper" from the Silicon Valley series is a reference to him. Probably not but fun to entertain.
What's encoded is not the audio - even the best audio codecs need on the order of 4kbits/sec to encode legible speech - but the actual semantics on how voice is produced.
Suppose you want to do this for movies. 8 kilobytes doesn't sound like enough, though the script of the movie could easily be compressed to that. But it's posible to imagine a system into which all the skill of the cinematographer, director, script writer, actors, etc. are built, with from 8 kilobytes of instructions could create, perhaps not the original movie, but something comparable.
Is this doable? Does some random crank have the remotest chance of pulling this off with the technology of the day? No. But that's likely the line of reasoning employed.