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