Philosophical Hurdles I

Philosophical Hurdles I

Compression is not an easy subject for people to master. Although many of thealgorithms in this book are very straightforward, there are larger issues about compression that are not well deˇ ned.This often means that it is easy to grasp how an algorithm will work, but it is hard to understand why it must fail. Understanding compression algorithms at a larger level means grappling with some fairly philosophical distinctions about information and knowledge. While they' re not easy nor essential, they are the only way to gain true mastery of the subject.

One of the ˇ rsthurdles for many programmers is understanding that compression is possible at all. Today, many people learn of compression before learning to program because the practice is so common. Most people install software to day with popular decompression packages. In the past, though, many learned to program before learning about compression.

My first instinct was that compression was impossible. If data were being
removed, then information was being lost. Clearly, the amount reconstructed at
the other end when decompression took place couldn't be as rich or robust as what
went into the compression routine. Information had been lost. How was it possible
to compress a file containing the name, rank, and serial number of a soldier? Sure,
the name could be compressed by replacing the ˇ rstname with an initial, but then
it would be impossible to figureout what the firstname was later.

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