It’s a bit of a weird shower thought but basically I was wondering hypothetical if it would be possible to take data from a social media site like Reddit and map the most commonly used words starting at 1 and use a separate application to translate it back and forth.

So if the word “because” was number 100 it would store the value with three characters instead of seven.

There could also be additions for suffixes so “gardening” could be 5000+1 or a word like “hoped” could be 2000-2 because the “e” is already present.

Would this result in any kind of space savings if you were using larger amounts of text like a book series?

  • Bizarroland@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Then how is it that I was able to link to 800 words with 5 characters, (stripping aside the static portion of the links)?

    • KerfuffleEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      First just think about the logic of what I said before: if there are finite number of combinations in the link, how can you possibly link to a larger number of items? It’s just logically impossible.

      Then how is it that I was able to link to 800 words with 5 characters, (stripping aside the static portion of the links)?

      The fact that you were able to link to 800 words doesn’t really mean anything. somesite.com/a could point to a file that was gigabytes. This doesn’t meant the file got compressed to a. Right?

      There also might be less combinations for that site than it appears. For an 800 word chunk of grammatical English text, there are a lot less combinations than the equivalent length in arbitrary characters. Instead of representing each character in a word, it could just use an id like dog=1, antidisestablishmentarianism=2 and so on. Even using tricks like that though, it’s pretty likely you’re only able to link to a subset of all the possible combinations.

      Regarding compression in general, it’s a rule that you can’t compress something independent of its content. If you could do that, even if the compression only reduced the file by the tiniest fraction you could just repeatedly apply the algorithm until you end up where the problem I described is obvious. If you could compress any large file down to a single byte, then that single byte can only represent 256 distinct values. However there are more than 256 distinct files that can exist, so clearly something went wrong. This rule is kind of like breaking the speed of light or perpetual motion: if you get an answer that says you have perpetual motion or FTL travel then you automatically know you did something wrong. Same thing with being able to compress without regard to the content.