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A Fictional Compression Metric Moves Into the Real World 133

Tekla Perry (3034735) writes The 'Weissman Score' — created for HBO's "Silicon Valley" to add dramatic flair to the show's race to build the best compression algorithm — creates a single score by considering both the compression ratio and the compression speed. While it was created for a TV show, it does really work, and it's quickly migrating into academia. Computer science and engineering students will begin to encounter the Weissman Score in the classroom this fall."
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A Fictional Compression Metric Moves Into the Real World

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  • Bullshit.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @04:42PM (#47552863)

    A "combined score" for speed and ratio is useless, as that relation is not linear.

  • by retchdog ( 1319261 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @04:46PM (#47552879) Journal

    The so-called Weissman score is just proportional to (compression ratio)/log(time to compress).

    I guess the idea is that twice as much compression is always twice as good, while increases in time become less significant if you're already taking a long time. For example, taking a day to compress is much worse than taking an hour, but taking 24 days to compress is only somewhat worse than taking one day since you're talking offline/parallel processing anyway.

    The log() seems kind of an arbitrary choice, but whatever. It's no better or worse than any other made-up metric, as long as you're not taking it too seriously.

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