Daniel_Burfoot comments on K-complexity of everyday things - Less Wrong

11 Post author: cousin_it 04 December 2011 02:54PM

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Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 05 December 2011 02:41:44AM 1 point [-]

Yes, definitely. A simple example: one tool that will be useful to compress FW is just a dictionary (or index) of English words. Instead of encoding the letters of a word, you encode the index of the word in the list, and save bits by doing so. You have to pay an up-front cost to encode the dictionary itself, but it should still be worthwhile overall, even for a single novel. Now when you compress two novels together, you get the benefit of the dictionary for the second novel without having to repay the upfront cost.

Comment author: cousin_it 05 December 2011 02:52:49AM *  4 points [-]

Yes, of course. But I was thinking of a more substantial savings. The question is more like, does Finnegans Wake represent a sort of pointer to our branch of the multiverse, which you could use to compress War and Peace down to a couple kilobytes? How much "entanglement" is there?