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Disclaimer that makes the rest of the post make more sense: I do not have a college degree and did not have much of a formal education after about age 13 or so. I thought I had stumbled upon a new and better way to do universal data compression. It was promising because I built a functional demo that beat (as measured by compression ratio) the native zip tool on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and even beat LZMA - all by a wide margin. Fundamentally, the project failed because it was not actually able to universally compress data. The technical concept is most easily described as attempting to produce an algorithm that would offer close to the Kolmogorov complexity of the desired data, by rapidly changing the structure of the algorithm, the logical and mathmatical operators within the algorithm, and the initial values of the variables in the algorithm - i.e. attempting to brute-force something close to Kolmogorov complexity, which worked about as well as it sounds like it did: extremely well (better than alternatives) for already small, already extremely low-entropy files, and somewhere between "horribly" and "not at all" for everything else. Trying to build it made me a more skilled developer, allowed me to learn more then I ever would've guessed I'd known about the Pigeonhole Pinciple, Kolmogorov complexity, information theory as an entire field, etc. However, this one also made me a much better person. Bringing this project up to a colleague resulted in a book recommendation. That book helped to shine a spotlight on some subconscious racial views I formerly held that were unhealthy, but that I was unaware of, and being made aware of them allowed me to work past them. |