On May 19, 2011, at 9:48 35AM, Jamie Bowden wrote: > I know you're having fun with him, but I think what the original poster > had in mind was more like thinking of a file as just a string of > numbers. Create an equation that generates that string of numbers, send > equation, regenerate string on other end. Of course, if it was that > easy, someone would already have done it
Yes. I guess I was too terse with my answer, but this is known as Kolmogorv complexity. It's a well-known concept, and in general you can't construct such equations/programs/what-have-yous. Wikipedia even gives a proof of that... --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb