[strbean]

I think statements about theoretical limits on compression are ignoring emergent properties. We know you can "compress" certain things infinitely; for example, the Mandelbrot set.

Compressing arbitrary inputs using emergent properties may never be practical, but in it seems reasonable that you could trade computation for compression to an arbitrary extent (searching an emergent series for chunks of data that match your input).

[willis936]

No information we capture has infinite precision anyway, so fractal based compression falls under lossy compression. It is a much more complicated task to identify fundamental limits on lossy compression performance and an even harder task to have a collective agreement on "good enough" for a given purpose.

[throwaway_bad]

I was actually thinking more about natural languages than fractals. Maybe human thought is so utterly derivative you can just generate a random stream of words and it will contain most of the text that humanity will ever produce.

Then it can be compressed down to an index into the libraryofbabel