High Compression: Information, Intimacy, and the Entropy of Life
Brian Christian · 2016
I took a passage from Ulysses at random and saved it on my com puter as raw text: 1,717 bytes. Then I wrote the words over and over until it matched the length of the Joyce excerpt, and saved that: 1,717 bytes. Then I had Mac OS X try to compress them. The blah file compressed all the way down to 478 bytes, just 28% of its previ ous size, but Ulysses only came down to 79% of its prior size, or 1,352 bytes—leaving it nearly three times as large as the blah file. When the compressor pushed down, something in the Joyce pushed back.