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 (or who knows, IBM might have done this decades ago, put it on a virtual shelf in their IP closet, and forgot about it...apparently they do that sort of thing all the time). Compression is mathematically akin to cryptography, with the compressed file being a huge seed with a standard algorithm (and a very weak one by modern cryptography standards, sure, but imagine someone trying to figure out a .zip file in the 50s). Jamie -----Original Message----- From: Leo Bicknell [mailto:bicknell@ufp.org] Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2011 5:03 PM To: nanog Subject: Re: Had an idea - looking for a math buff to tell me if it's possiblewith today's technology. In a message written on Wed, May 18, 2011 at 04:33:34PM -0400, Christopher Morrow wrote:
no no no.. it's simply, since the OP posited a math solution, md5. ship the size of file + hash, compute file on the other side. All files can be moved anywhere regardless of the size of the file in a single packet.
The solution is left as an exercise for the reader.
Bah, you should include the solution, it's so trivial. Generate all possible files and then do an index lookup on the MD5. It's a little CPU heavy, but darn simple to code. You can even stop when you get a match, which turns out to be a HUGE optimization. :) -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/