On 14 July 2016 at 05:35, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: > Michael Torrie <torr...@gmail.com>: > > If the data is truly random then it does not matter whether you have 5 > > bytes or 5 GB. There is no pattern to discern, and having more chunks > > of random data won't make it possible to compress. > > That's true if "truly random" means "evenly distributed". You might have > genuine random numbers with some other distribution, for example > Gaussian: <URL: https://www.random.org/gaussian-distributions/>. Such > sequences of random numbers may well be compressible. >
No one is saying that *all* random data is incompressible - in fact, some random samples are *very* compressible. A single sample of random data might look very much like the text of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (especially if your method of choosing the random sample was to pick a book off a library shelf). But unless otherwise qualified, a claim of being able to compress random data is taken to mean any and all sets of random data. Anyway, that's going to be my only contribution to this thread. Tim Delaney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
