From WinZips to GIFs, Jacob Ziv’s Algorithms Have Powered Decades of Compression

I know it was meant as a bit of a goof, but i always thought that the &quot;look up the file in pi!&quot; idea was a clever way of doing compression[1], exploiting the fact that pi is normal and thus any given sequence of numbers will happen <i>eventually</i>, meaning that any given <i>file</i> that could possibly exist will show up eventually. Using this, you could theoretically just store two numbers to compress <i>anything</i>, a beginning point and an end point for its position in pi.<p>I&#x27;m aware this would be unbearably slow and the numbers to store really big files might end up taking more memory than LZMA, so I don&#x27;t need a lecture about it, I just thought it was an interesting idea.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;philipl&#x2F;pifs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;philipl&#x2F;pifs</a>

Did the word &quot;compression&quot; get cut off due to title length? Or is it intentionally being compressed in the original title as a meta-joke? Turns out it&#x27;s the former

&gt; The following year, the two researchers issued a refinement, LZ78. That algorithm became the basis for the Unix compress program used in the early ’80s; WinZip and Gzip, born in the early ’90s; and the GIF and TIFF image formats.<p>I don&#x27;t understand the inclusion of WinZip and gzip here. Those are based on DEFLATE, which I thought was deliberately derived from LZ77 and LZSS rather than anything particular to the LZ78&#x2F;LZW lineage (for patent reasons). Am I confused about something?

&gt; Without these algorithms, we’d likely be mailing large data files on discs instead of sending them across the Internet with a click, buying our music on CDs instead of streaming it, and looking at Facebook feeds that don’t have bouncing animated images.<p>I really hate these hyperbolic statements. It makes it seem like if it wasn&#x27;t for Ziv and Lempel <i>no one</i> would have figured out how to do lossless compression, which is just utterly ridiculous.

“We would pick a book and then study together, like religious Jews studying the Hebrew Bible.“ Damn, I miss the days when I had the opportunity to actually do that. As a researcher, nowadays I’m forced to skim over many papers a day without having the time to actually study them and learn something deep about what the authors proposed. Anyone else thinks that the joy of creating&#x2F;learning has been replaced by the need of constant output and technical literature feels really shallow nowadays?

accessible link for nojs clients:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Bb1Aw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Bb1Aw</a>