[140804] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Had an idea - looking for a math buff to tell me if it's
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Bellovin)
Thu May 19 14:01:26 2011
From: Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <275FEA2949B48341A3B46F424B613D857C43@WDC-MX.photon.com>
Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 14:01:20 -0400
To: Jamie Bowden <jamie@photon.com>
Cc: nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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
