Re: Had an idea - looking for a math buff to tell me if it's possiblewith today's technology.

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