Steve Jolly mused: > > William Robb wrote: > > Imagine you have 50 identical pennies on a table top. > > An uncompressed file describes each penny in detail. > > A JPEG describes one penny in detail, and then tells you where the other > > 49 are located on the table. > > Again, I'm sorry, but JPEG doesn't work like that either. Fractal > compression algorithms are conceptually similar to the method you > describe, but there aren't any popular implementations of those.
The analogy has got garbled in the retelling - the original had none of the (incorrect) descriptions of any underlying algorithm. It's a nice conceptual idea - enough information to see it's a layout made up of pennies, but not enough to see the blemishes on the real coins - and one that even a non-technical person can understand. And at that level, it's even pretty close to being technically correct!
