Had an idea - looking for a math buff to tell me if it's possible with today's technology.

Wed May 18 20:27:14 UTC 2011

Wildly off-topic for the NANOG mailing-list, as it has -zero- relevance to
'network operations'

> Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 13:07:32 -0700
> Subject: Had an idea - looking for a math buff to tell me if it's possible
> 	with today's technology.
> From: Landon Stewart <lstewart at superb.net>
> To: nanog <nanog at nanog.org>
>
> Lets say you had a file that was 1,000,000,000 characters consisting of
> 8,000,000,000bits.  What if instead of transferring that file through the
> interwebs you transmitted a mathematical equation to tell a computer on the
> other end how to *construct* that file.  First you'd feed the file into a
> cruncher of some type to reduce the pattern of 8,000,000,000 bits into an
> equation somehow.  Sure this would take time, I realize that.  The equation
> would then be transmitted to the other computer where it would use its
> mad-math-skillz to *figure out the answer* which would theoretically be the
> same pattern of bits.  Thus the same file would emerge on the other end.
>
> The real question here is how long would it take for a regular computer to
> do this kind of math?

I have, on my computer, an encoder/decoder that does _exactly_ that.

Both the encoder and decoder are _amazingly_ fast -- as fast as a file copy,
in fact.

the average size of the tranmsitted files, across all possible input files
is exactly 100% of the size of the input files.  (one *cannot* do better
than that, across all possible inputs -- see the 'counting' problem, in
data-compression theory)

> Just a weird idea I had.  If it's a good idea then please consider this
> intellectual property.  LOL

'Weird' is one word for it.  You might want to read up on the subject
of 'data compression', to get an idea of how things work.

See also "polynominial curve-fitting", for the real-world limits of your
theory.
for the real-world limits of your
theory.