New compression method

[Ryan M.]

Originally Posted by ahecht

I'm not sure what this guy is trying to pull (such as whether he is an existing member who set up a dummy account for this or just a random troll), but I can assure people that something is up.

I agree that it is a little unbelievable. Alaphabob, I'd trust almost anyone here with something that isn't protected yet. Just ask anyone with 5+ "rep(utation) points" to look over your algorithm. (Those are the green dot's on the left of the darker-grey bar above their post.) I'm not saying that less rep'd people aren't trustworthy, but it's something to reasure you.

Originally Posted by ahecht

Besides, with most compression methods, compressing an already compressed file results in a slightly larger file size.

That's because, with all most all compression schemes, they work by creating a library, at some point in the file, and put multi-byte strings into it. The rest of the file is then encoded by putting a one byte key in place of the original string. If this string happens more than once, then you save space. For instance, if you have a string in a text file like "happy" three times, then you put "happy" in your library once and 3 one byte markers in the text for a total of around 8 bytes (there's probably also buts separating different items in the library, etc, which is why I say "around"). The original three happies took up 15 bytes.

When you recompress the file, it ends up compressing a file with no, or very few, redundencies, which are what make the library method work so well.

EDIT:
Why the heck did I choose happy? Why not something cool, like FIRST?