Data compression
Encoding information in fewer bits by exploiting patterns and redundancy in the source data.
Every file contains patterns — repeated sequences, skewed symbol frequencies, structural regularities. Compression algorithms find those patterns and replace them with shorter representations, then reverse the process on decompression. Lossless compression recovers the original exactly; lossy compression discards detail the receiver won't miss. The hard limit is set by Shannon's entropy: no scheme can compress below the true information content of the source. Extreme compression ratios are therefore evidence of extreme redundancy — or of a model that has learned the source's structure well enough to predict it.
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Overall = breadth + depth + substance + ½·novelty + freshness (a small boost that halves each week)
The 445-byte world map
A recognizable map of the whole world, squeezed into 445 bytes — by making the land more solid, not less.
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