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Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

gzipped it's a 9043 byte file when the source is the number expressed exactly as bits. gzipping that 9043 byte file yields a 129 byte file, which gzip can't compress any further. Base64 of the file:

  H4sICBPHnlYCA2EuYmluegDt0LENQQEUQNHnK7xINF8rLIAVbKH88VU0ZlATK4gt1DQ6vURMoBID
  iN4CknOa29/BNrN72U+LZj2eL1fxPDU6EXE+3CbvUTEMAAAAAAAAAODfPfq9/DZfx6petw2B32Z5
  XZT31mYXH9vDv0RTIwAA

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Neato! Verified with:

  echo "H4sICBPHnlYCA2EuYmluegDt0LENQQEUQNHnK7xINF8rLIAVbKH88VU0ZlATK4gt1DQ6vURMoBIDiN4CknOa29/BNrN72U+LZj2eL1fxPDU6EXE+3CbvUTEMAAAAAAAAAODfPfq9/DZfx6petw2B32Z5XZT31mYXH9vDv0RTIwAA" | base64 --decode | gzip -d | gzip -d | xxd

I see some redundancy there. The letter "A" appears many times in a row.

Also it could be compressed even further. All you need is a computer program that prints "1", 74 million times.

It's already been concisely expressed as 2^74,207,281 - 1, so you don't need a computer program that prints "1" 74 million times.

You just need a computer language that can interpret bignum math equations.

That would take ages to compute. Printing one is faster. And might produce the smallest file size if it's done in assembly.

but the metric was the most concise way to store the data

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