Hey, I was mulling over some old emails about randomly-generated numbers and realized that if I had an imperfectly random source (something less than 100% unpredictable), that compressing the output would compress it to the point where it was nearly so. Would there be any reason to choose one algorithm over another for this application?
I recall talking to a CS prof once who said that LZW compression was "optimal", which seemed and still seems really odd to me because optimal compression would generate a null output file. So surely he meant asymptotically optimal, or e-close to optimal, or something like that... anyone know? Obviously I will avoid any fixed-content headers and "magic numbers" by using a "raw" implementation of the algorithm, not reusing, say, gzip. Plus, I will be running as though the RNG was providing me with an infinitely long string, not reading everything into memory and trying to compress. It seems as though the Burroughs-Wheeler Transform (bzip2 et. al.) gets the best compression of the standard utilities... is it suitable for infinite length strings? Is there anything better? -- "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate." Unix "guru" for rent or hire -><- http://www.lightconsulting.com/~travis/ GPG fingerprint: 9D3F 395A DAC5 5CCC 9066 151D 0A6B 4098 0C55 1484 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]