The Sloot Digital Coding System -

[Quijibo69]

I guess some Dutch guy back in 1999 found a way to put full movies on to a chipcard and only 8KB in size each. He did this without compressing the files. He died of a heart attack before he could patent it.

I call BS!

Here's a link to the article:

http://www.esolz.net/blog/the-sloot-digital-coding-system-an-amazing-enigmatic-lost-invention/

 

[AnOminous]

I guess some Dutch guy back in 1999 found a way to put full movies on to a chipcard and only 8KB in size each.

Literally impossible. Anyone who believes this needs to lern 2 information theory.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

I guess some Dutch guy back in 1999 found a way to put full movies on to a chipcard and only 8KB in size each. He did this without compressing the files. He died of a heart attack before he could patent it.

I call BS!

Here's a link to the article:

http://www.esolz.net/blog/the-sloot-digital-coding-system-an-amazing-enigmatic-lost-invention/

I thought that this thread was going to be about sluthate misspelling slut as sloot

Anyways the only reason why something like this wouldn't be discovered after someones death is if it didn't exist
Even if the actual device itself were lost the notes would be very difficult to lose completely short of a nuclear explosion or other massive disaster

 

[AnOminous]

This guy would probably be a cow if he were alive.

From The Stick of Jan Sloot

Evidently, Jan Sloot was a crank. He showed all the signs attributed to cranks. He was paranoid. He felt himself an expert in a field he had no higher education in. He worked alone. He spent decades on one problem any mathematician could have told him was impossible to solve in the first place. He got angry at people who questioned him. He felt misunderstood. He had delusions of grandeur.

I think Jan Sloot really believed he had found a way to compress movies to one kilobyte. Probably he had imagined something as the alien's stick, something that would be theoretically possible in an alternate world, with infinitely divisible particles, but impossible in our reality. He probably lacked the mathematical insight to see that his 'invention' was a farce. In his prototype, he faked his invention, which is why he refused to let anyone near it, and answered only in mystical vagueness to questions. He probably imagined that, with enough money, he could get his invention to work for real. He probably did not feel himself a charlatan or a crook, but an honest businessman, who needed a starting capital to create the world's greatest invention, make some people incredibly rich, and win a Nobel prize.

What truly amazes me is that a man as Roel Pieper, who is a professor of Computer Science no less, could fall for his story, to the point where he invested a huge amount of capital. If his role in this story is really as reported in the media, his credibility as a computer scientist has been seriously tarnished. In my opinion, the University of Twente, with which Pieper is associated, should at least perform an internal investigation, to assess whether Pieper's position can be maintained.

 

[Conrix]

Yeah calling bullshit. You can't put something as big as a 1-4GB movie into 8 kb.

 

[Dr. Meme]

they should do this with porn videos and call it the Slut Digital Coding System

 

[Marvin]

http://matt.might.net/articles/why-infinite-or-guaranteed-file-compression-is-impossible/

 

[KatsuKitty]

Programmer here. I have no idea what the hell this guy is talking about, so I can't really tell you if it's feasible or not. He denies it's compression, but it would have to be compression, because "compression" is literally taking larger data and using algorithms to reconstruct that same data from smaller data. Which is exactly what he's on about.

To get an MPEG-2 480p movie down to 8KB, you would need something so sophisticated, it would be able to reproduce shapes and colours from a small data structure of some type. Almost like an animated version of vector metafile images. For example, instead of drawing every pixel of a circle, it would just have a single-byte command saying "draw circle". This is much harder than you think it is when you want to make it photorealistic. I can't even begin to tell you how something like that would even work. It probably didn't. Especially on 1999 CPUs.

Given that he can't clearly define compression and that this all sounds like rambling nonsense, I'm willing to bet it was a hoax. It even has all the hallmarks of the traditional "invented a perpetual motion machine and died after Exxon slipped me a mickey" story.

 

[AnOminous]

To get an MPEG-2 480p movie down to 8KB, you would need something so sophisticated, it would be able to reproduce shapes and colours from a small data structure of some type.

There's a theoretical maximum for compressibility of data, though. And even with lossy compression, there's a level at which you entirely lose the signal. It would be fairly easy to compress something like, say, 10 hours of a black screen, because there is little information in there, but once there's any actual information (like video), it is simply impossible to compress that, lossy or otherwise, without destroying the signal. Video can usually be compressed to some degree, because information repeats and is shared between frames during motion, but there's a limit to that.

Now, there are ways of referring to data that are much smaller than the data itself. For instance, something much smaller than 1k can reliably refer to any movie I have on my hard drive already, and it's called a filename, but obviously, it isn't the actual data, just a pointer to it.

Claims like this remind me of the Borges story The Library of Babel, in which the universe is an infinite library containing every possible text. However, the vast majority of them are, as a result, entirely incomprehensible bunches of random letters, with only the rarest of books containing anything recognizable at all, with it strongly implied that even those are basically just random noise.

One book, which my father once saw in a hexagon in circuit 15-94, consisted of the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (much consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters whose original manuscript has neither numbers nor capital letters; punctuation is limited to the comma and the period. Those two marks, the space, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five sufficient symbols that our unknown author is referring to. The penultimate page contains the phrase O Tine thy pyramids. This much is known: For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.

My comparison to compression is this. Suppose you did have such a Library. You could "compress" any data by simply referring to it by something like a filename, referring to one of the books in the library that matched the location of the book you wanted, since every possible book would exist in it.

A mathematical proof is beyond me, but it seems intuitive that because of the vast number of such books, the process of actually referring to the specific book in the Library would require as much information as the book itself contained.

There isn't a shortcut around this.

Similarly, "guaranteed" compression schemes are bogus. One class of data simply can't be compressed, and that is well encrypted data, which for one thing, has a flat histogram, i.e. is indistinguishable from random noise. Compression, by its nature, seizes on things like repetitions and similarities to be able to use short-cuts to refer to the data, and encrypted data (or noise) has nothing like that to shorten.

Video does have patterns and recognizable repetitions like this that can be used to shorten the data representing it, but eventually you get down to what makes that particular video unique, and beyond that, you can't compress it any further.

So compressing a whole movie down to something like 8K just doesn't work.

As you point out:

it would just have a single-byte command saying "draw circle".

Except really, when you're getting down that small, I think you'd basically be requiring the algorithm to be able to fit commands like that into a single bit. So in other words, "draw a red circle 5 pixels in diameter," "draw a purple dodecahedron 9 pixels on a side," and thousands of other possible codes. But you have to fit all of these into 0 or 1. Not a string of 0s or 1s, but one single solitary bit.

It's basically a perpetual motion machine for compression. It can't possibly work and nobody who actually invented such a thing, even if they just keeled over dead, would have failed to leave something behind that would give some indication how it could work.

I've probably given this too much thought for it being absolutely transparent bullshit.

 

[Strelok]

Late I know, but actually reading this made me just gasp as how insanely dumb it was.

I'm a bit intoxicated so hopefully this math works out and i didn't forget to carry a decimal point somewhere.

I think the easiest way to explain exactly how retarded this is to a layman is to break it down. Now first off, we're going to cut this system some slack. We're going to assume it's a short sun dance movie, so 60 min. I like 60, it's a nice round number. Now, movies are generally shot at 24 frames per second. As we all all hopefully know, there are 60 seconds in a minute.

That means an hour length movie is 86,000 frames long.

Now this man claims he could get a movie down to 8kb. A kilobyte is 8000 bits, or 1s and 0s. 8x8,000 is 64,000. That means 64,000 1s and 0s.

This means every frame of that movie (and even on old standard sqaure TVs we're talking hundreds of thousands of pixels per frame) would need to be able to be expressed on average as less than a single 1 or 0.

Now I have no idea what he means "without compression" but since compression can be, in its most basic term, be boiled down to "instead of aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, a*20", I think even if you know nothing about tech you can see the problem. The fact that he claims that he invented something that doesn't use binary isn't really a game changer when we're dealing with this scale.

 

[thick internet digit web]

I know it's BS but i think some executive who didn't understand it was obviously bullshit really did think it was real and sent someone to kill him and destroy the evidence. The CIA had their heart attack gun for decades by this time, and some rich belligerent could easily obtain it. Even in today's world, knowledge beyond how to click icons and search for something isn't common even to execs in computer companies, so i can see one falling for the scam. It really does make you think about how far ahead we would be if advanced technologies weren't destroyed and its inventors killed for being a threat to someone's profits.

 

[Deadwaste]

I know it's BS but i think some executive who didn't understand it was obviously bullshit really did think it was real and sent someone to kill him and destroy the evidence. The CIA had their heart attack gun for decades by this time, and some rich belligerent could easily obtain it. Even in today's world, knowledge beyond how to click icons and search for something isn't common even to execs in computer companies, so i can see one falling for the scam. It really does make you think about how far ahead we would be if advanced technologies weren't destroyed and its inventors killed for being a threat to someone's profits.

it's been 5 years, you need to move on

 

[thick internet digit web]

it's been 5 years, you need to move on

obligatory maybe the real sloot digital encoding system was the friends we made along the way