Hello everyone!

I thought I'd inform all of you science geeks out there on two pretty cool advancements that were released yesterday.

The first, is the discovery of a compression algorithm that compresses "random" data up to a 100:1 ratio. Now, if you don't know a lot about compression algorithms (and if you call yourself a computer scientist you should!) then you probably wouldn't see the problem with this. The problem is that all current compression algorithms find patterns in the data to be compressed and use these repetitions to shrink the size of the data. The problems comes in when you consider Claude Shannon's Information Theory. In this theory (which is widely accepted), Shannon basically says that it is impossible to perform compression on "random" data. It is a fairly logical conclusion, cause if everything bit is important in the position it is in, how can you get rid of it and reduce the size of the information without lossing it forever? Well, supposidly ZeoSync has overcome information theory. There press release can be read: here

The second advancement deals with quantum computing (my fave!). It seems that scientists have found a way to store light in a crystal, and then re-emit that light from the crystal. This is a great advancement because it is basically a quantum hard drive. Though I wonder how well the crystal keeps the information held in the light away from outside interference (in order to make sure decoherence doesn't occur and mess up the calculations).

I thought these were two interesting advancements. Please feel free to give your opinions, or ask whatever questions you'd like, and I or another forum member would be more than happy to answer you.

Regards,
Wizeman