[140740] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Had an idea - looking for a math buff to tell me if it's possible
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Bellovin)
Wed May 18 16:51:48 2011
From: Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTimJ==S62Z=RbL+nciPwk-m5RVUWPQ@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 16:33:19 -0400
To: Landon Stewart <lstewart@superb.net>
Cc: nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On May 18, 2011, at 4:07 32PM, Landon Stewart wrote:
> Lets say you had a file that was 1,000,000,000 characters consisting of
> 8,000,000,000bits. What if instead of transferring that file through the
> interwebs you transmitted a mathematical equation to tell a computer on the
> other end how to *construct* that file. First you'd feed the file into a
> cruncher of some type to reduce the pattern of 8,000,000,000 bits into an
> equation somehow. Sure this would take time, I realize that. The equation
> would then be transmitted to the other computer where it would use its
> mad-math-skillz to *figure out the answer* which would theoretically be the
> same pattern of bits. Thus the same file would emerge on the other end.
>
> The real question here is how long would it take for a regular computer to
> do this kind of math?
>
> Just a weird idea I had. If it's a good idea then please consider this
> intellectual property. LOL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
