1st International Longest Tweet Results

Dr_Evil6_6_6 writes "Slashdot had a story about the 1st International Longest Tweet Contest last month, and the winners have just been announced." The winner is impressive.

Looking at that entry

[SpazmodeusG]

I don't get it.
If they ask what can be arbitrarily stored in the 4339bits available then there you can store 4339 arbitrary bits. It's a rule of compression. If they are asking for an English language compression program there are plenty better out there. Also if the goal is compression of English text and they aren't including the program size in the tweet then the competition can easily be cheated using a dictionary in the program that can be looked up.

At the winner it's not a particularly good compression algorithm. It doesn't even seem to take bayesian probability of characters into account. I can't see any arithmetic coding (mathematically the perfect entropy encoder) either.

Re:Looking at that entry

[Volguus Zildrohar]

You don't get it?

A weak, inexplicable imitation of earlier, better tech?

That's Twitter in a nutshell.

Erm ...

[daveime]

Except for the fact the algorithms he has submitted have NOTHING to do with compression, and are just a method of mapping the 4339 bits into the allowable Unicode character set over 140 x 32 bit character "slots", i.e. encoding / decoding only.

With 4339 bits, hell in theory the longest actual tweet you could make is 2^4339 of any single character you choose, using the 4339 bits just to represent a (very large) counter of how many times to repeat the character.

Considering that 2^4339 is approximately 10^1305, and there are probably only 10^82 atoms in the whole universe, that's one bloody long tweet.

Re:Erm ...

[zarzu]

yes, but there is no trick to mapping to 4339 characters, it's simply the thing you will be doing if you want the most arbitrary bits transmitted. it's like a contest to paint a car: you have a fixed size car with a known surface area and the target of the contest is to paint the biggest surface. now you can either simply paint the whole surface and you will have won or you're gonna do some crazy pattern painting that totally misses the point. now tell me why did we just have this painting contest?

Re:Erm ...

[pjt33]

Yes, but that's not what GPP was talking about. Why on Earth would you assume that comments on /. would be on-topic, when that would require reading TFS? ;)