anyone who's ever had to pack for a trip has probably known the frustration of
trying to cram almost a suitcase worth of stuff into a backpack I mean sure we
could suck it up and leave a few items behind or haul around our bulky luggage
with us if they're so important but if we did that then our bag won't fit in
the overhead compartment anyway and all we're trying to bring is a few extra
pairs of underwear just in case we eat some bad tandoori chicken well that got
gross but other than that was pretty much a perfect analogy for why data
compression became so important to reduce storage requirements and to
improve transfer speeds over standard connections these packaging services are
kind of like our roommate who catches us standing on our bag trying to zip it up
and says you know you uh can just roll
your laundry and save like a ton of space right and as it turns out when we
try it for ourselves the smug little turd is right not only does all of our
stuff now fit but we even have more room to cram with stuff we'll never use like
that copy of ET the Extraterrestrial that we definitely don't watch every
night and cry back on topic obviously
data can't be rolled in quite the same manner as slightly pre-worn laundry so
coding Engineers devise algorithms capable of breaking down longer strings
of data into shorter ones then reassembling them later using what
they've retained an easy way to describe this would be like breaking down the
equation 2 * 2 * 2 2 * 2 * 2 into 2 to
the 5th power which is much faster to write and simpler to articulate but lus
I actually know a thing or two about coding and uh one of those things is
that the use of exponential symbols is simply not possible well first off
thankfully we weren't roommates in college I mean talk about smug second
you're correct as well while it is possible to write a command string which
describes an exponential function it usually isn't much of a space saver so
maybe a better way to demonstrate how a compress algorithm works is to use
something like a string of x's and o's or zeros and ones if you're catching the
similarities here let's say we have a string of eight digits which is spelled
out as XXX o XXX now an algorithm may
look at this and decide that every time it comes across a new digit it will
replicate it and then note how many times it's been repeated this would
cause our string to transform into the smaller x302 X3 while this did reduce
overall size it only managed to do so by 25% which which isn't exactly going to
allow us to cram our drives full or transfer large files over the Internet
more efficiently that's where more specifically designed algorithms will
come in to strip the code to its most basic form instead simply adding all the
X's together by treating each as a value of one then listing all the O's followed
with a digit count as before then we end up with a string that would look like
3023 which we can now see as half the size of the original code now obviously
this example is rudimentary at best but it gives an idea of how mathematicians
are able to achieve and then further improve upon this feat as time goes on
now this example would be known as lossless compression all of the original
data remains intact and is a requirement
for programs or documents but if you're
willing to give up some detail in the original file lossy compression
algorithms can be used for media files like music and movies as long as you
understand that the tighter you cram it the lower the playback quality you'll
experience which you can actually learn a little bit more about here in our
video specifically about video compression speaking of compression no
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