- ... decompressed.1
- A variant of one of our algorithms has been used
successfully for several years in the virtual memory system of the
Apple Newton, a personal digital assistant with no disk
[SW91] (Walter Smith, personal communication 1994, 1997).
While we have not previously published this algorithm, we sketched it
for Smith and he used it in the Newton, with good results--it
achieved slightly less compression than a Ziv-Lempel algorithm Apple
had used previously, but was much faster. Unfortunately, we do not
have any detailed performance comparisons.
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- ...
false,2
- It is worth stressing this again, because
there is widespread confusion about the ``optimality'' of
some compression algorithms. In general, an encoding
scheme (such as Huffman coding or arithmetic coding) can be
provably optimal within some small factor, but a compressor
cannot, unless the regularities in the data are known in advance and
in detail. Sometimes compression algorithms are proven optimal
based on the simplifying assumption that the source is a stochastic
(randomized, typically Markov) source, but real data sources
in programs are generally not stochastic[WJNB95],
so the proof does not hold for real data.
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- ... different.3
- The 22/10 split was
arrived at experimentally, using an early data set that partially
overlaps the one used in this study. The effectiveness of the
algorithm is not very sensitive to this parameter, however, and
varying the split by 2 bits does not seem to make much
difference--using more high bits means that matches are encoded more
compactly, but somewhat fewer things match.
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- ...[Nel95].4
- ``Delta coding'' is something of a misnomer
because it's really a modeling technique with an obvious encoding
strategy.
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