Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, not fiction at all, pretty much what is used for state-of-the-art compression.
The fiction part is being able to notch the bar sufficiently precise to store any significant amount of data.
:-)
A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
131–140 of 150 posts
Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty light compression from what I can tell - basically just squashing down runs of nulls to a single count.
The compression is basic run-length encoding, leveraging the Perl repetition operator (x), and the property of the Perl print/say functions that they concat items passed in a list before writing to STDOUT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Multiplicative-Operator... https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/say.html https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/print.html
I tried xz -9 on it and found, to my surprise, that it was actually longer than RLE!
Then I tried gzip -9, because perhaps that has a smaller header? Yup, saved a few bytes, now it's about the same size. Finally, I remembered that bzip2 does a lot better on text than gzip, and who knows, it might also have a shorter header than xz. Again, a few more bytes saved! Down to 223, where the original is 249 bytes (including the 'say' part but excluding the unnecessary delimiting apostrophes or the rest of the command).
Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a fair assumption to make, as the difference between Tron and Snake is effectively just single player vs multiplayer.
No it isn't. In TRON you leave a trail behind. In Snake, you grow as you eat and drag your body along the path you crawled. TRON's trail is static, Snakes body is dynamic.
So then OP created single-player Tron instead of Snake?
Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, not happy about that idiocy (probably 1MB as video) burning through 10% of my monthly bandwidth on the first day of the month...
Wow, how low is your monthly download cap?? What ISP and where?
I used to have 250MB free with my internet contract until the ISP silently upgraded it to 500MB recently (must have been the past year or so, not sure when).
If you use it only occasionally to read a few articles, you can do fine with only a few megabytes. Heck, I'd almost say kilobytes if bloat wasn't so common. Anyway, that's until shit like this comes along. If you were truly trying to watch a video---sure, that uses a lot of that tiny data bundle in one go, but a gif that should have been a video truly leaves you wondering why was this necessary?!
Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#135Man I love these things. Back before Twitter upped their character limits, I remember a trick to cram more data in a tweet was to abuse how Twitter counts characters (it attempts to count visually rather than by byte), so by using a ton of multipart emojis or larger Unicode characters to over double the information that could fit in a tweet.
I thought about using Unicode, but it felt like cheating. Perhaps someone can fit two games in a single multibyte tweet?
Multibyte chars is optimizing for Twitter, not for a set amount of bytes. If you try to fit in 140 bytes and you use >140 bytes because they are multibyte chars, then yeah, you're cheating. But if you're trying to "fit in a tweet", I'd say that's perfectly fair game.
Anyhow, two games... cool, but to be perfectly honest, I thought the game was going to be more like the real snake than just drawing a non-overlapping line on screen. A more impressive game might be more impressive than two games.
Then again, two games is also pretty darn cool.
Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what does that have to do with the emergent ratio between the notch and the rod? There may be 10^35 possible steps, but that does not mean that the answer, the ratio of the notch and the rod, will be limited by that. The answer will come from the number line, where any irrational number can have however many trailing numbers. If the ratio of the rod and the notch is 22/7, how much information would you say that i…
If 'x' marks the notch of a rod of length "1", [0---------x------------1], then the implied ratio is not x/(1-x), but x/1 (so the ratio is always But that is not the direction we are interested in. We would like, given a message, such as "l-o-v-e", or 12-15-22-05, or 0.12152205, to figure out what is the ratio that uniquely specifies it. As we can only mark one notch, we can create "only" h ~= 10^35 ratios, or repres…
Let's assume that the rod is 1 m in length, and say I wrote a book that is perfectly represented by the number 0.abcdefg...yz. If that number is perfectly represented by one of the ratios in set 'h', then have I not stored more infromation than 15 bytes?
As for x/(1-x), why not? And why limit ourselves to a 1 m rod? Why not a 22 m rod with a 7 m notch? I could then define the method of decoding the information via (Rod length)/(notch length). The I'd have 'infinite' information in the form of expression of pi.
My main issue with the parent comment is that they imply only 15 bytes of data could be stored via this method. I think that's prespoterous as the number of ratios my be only 15 bytes, the ratios themselves can have any possible size.
It becomes more a game of probability rather than that of exact numbers. Will you find the right number, from set 'h', that matches exactly what you wanted to say?
0.abcd...xyz = [(notch length=alpha*plank length)/(rod length=beta*plank length)]
Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#137Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming the length of the rod is 1m, and you have a resolution of one plank length, there are 10e35 possible ratios you can express (because that's the number of possible locations of the notch). that's about 2^113, which is a number which fits in 15 bytes of information. As discussed below, if you also allow for the bar to be the size of the observable universe, this doesn't increase by much. A notch or ratio is li…
How would you say a rod to notch ratio of 22/7 compares? How much information would you say that has?
Meaningless on its own. What matters is how many distinct ratios are possible.
Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
If 'x' marks the notch of a rod of length "1", [0---------x------------1], then the implied ratio is not x/(1-x), but x/1 (so the ratio is always But that is not the direction we are interested in. We would like, given a message, such as "l-o-v-e", or 12-15-22-05, or 0.12152205, to figure out what is the ratio that uniquely specifies it. As we can only mark one notch, we can create "only" h ~= 10^35 ratios, or repres…
Let's assume that the rod is 1 m in length, and say I wrote a book that is perfectly represented by the number 0.abcdefg...yz. If that number is perfectly represented by one of the ratios in set 'h', then have I not stored more infromation than 15 bytes? As for x/(1-x), why not? And why limit ourselves to a 1 m rod? Why not a 22 m rod with a 7 m notch? I could then define the method of decoding the information via (R…
Not really. You have stored something which has a representation of more than 15 bytes, but you will struggle to find a way to store most things longer than 15 bytes in this way. (everything can be transformed into a representation which is infinite in size anyway, for example by using an irrational base). Information really comes down to the number of possible values you can distinguish.
If you do the ratio thing you have described you will find that alpha and beta are many, many times the size of the observable universe for something like a book. If you allow the length of the rod itself to also contribute to the information, you have added another symbol so you can store more than 15 bytes, but this doesn't even double the amount of bytes you can store.
Re: A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's assume that the rod is 1 m in length, and say I wrote a book that is perfectly represented by the number 0.abcdefg...yz. If that number is perfectly represented by one of the ratios in set 'h', then have I not stored more infromation than 15 bytes? As for x/(1-x), why not? And why limit ourselves to a 1 m rod? Why not a 22 m rod with a 7 m notch? I could then define the method of decoding the information via (R…
Not really. You have stored something which has a representation of more than 15 bytes, but you will struggle to find a way to store most things longer than 15 bytes in this way. (everything can be transformed into a representation which is infinite in size anyway, for example by using an irrational base). Information really comes down to the number of possible values you can distinguish. If you do the ratio thing yo…
Total Human knowledge ~ 250 EB
Assuming all of it can be described as ascii characters, (ratio of.12152205 could be read as 12-15-22-05, or “l-o-v-e.”) then let's assume 4 numbers will be required to encode one letter. That gives us, in our limited system, 4 decimal bits to a byte (we really can't limit ourselves to just ratios that are sufficiently large and only made of 1s & 0s).
So, all human knowledge is, in our system,
250*(1024^6)=288230376151711740000 bytes.
(288230376151711740000*4)=1152921504606846976000
Now, as I said earlier, the ratios may have an impressive number of numbers in them, expressed in a decimal system, and there are an infinite number of them on the number line itself, that does not mean all of those are available for use. We are limited to ratios derived from lengths which are multiples of the plank length. Assuming, for a particular rod and it's notch, there is a set 'h' that contains all the possible ratios. We will be limited to such ratios only to find our matching ratio, the ratio through chance of cosmic infinity, or not. If not, then we have to increase/decrease the design length of the rod and the notch to change the set 'h', and hope there is a number we are looking for.
How many such ratios, of the required length of 1.15 * 10^21 numbers, would exist if derived solely through the ratios, is unknown and wholly dependent on the information that has to be encoded. The longer the data, the higher the probability of not finding the right number. As you put it, there will be 15 bytes of choice, or in a one meter rod there will be 10^32 number of choices of ratios to play with. If you doubled the length of the rod, you would have twice the amount of choice, as so on. Again,
0.abcd...xyz = [(notch length=alpha*plank length)/(rod length=beta*plank length)]
And again, you could find the ratio you are looking for, it will be a probability game.
Please read what I wrote carefully and respond point by point.