Boris Alexeev, Dustin G. Mixon
Motivated by a popular code golf challenge, we review some key ideas from information theory and discuss how to efficiently compress a streaming file with an acceptable error rate.
This paper contains 3 sections, 1 theorem, 9 equations.
Theorem 6
Take $\alpha\approx0.1854$ such that $(1+\alpha)^{1+\alpha} = (16\alpha)^\alpha$, and consider the largest $k$ such that the $k$th most common character is at least $\alpha$ times as likely as the $k-1$ most common characters combined. Then encoding the $k$ most common characters minimizes the objec
