Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

The first compression algorithm I implemented (on and IBM PC/AT in the mid '80s) was LZW. It's my favorite type of algorithm - elegant but hard to get your head wrapped around. Once you "get it" it seems so obvious.

View on HN

LZW is just a (nontrivial and very effective) trick to improve on the early behavior of LZ78; they are both asymptotically optimal.

LZ78 is incredibly simple, elegant AND easy to get your your head around. I had implemented it once in 2 lines of Python. some 25 years ago. If I can shake the rust maybe I'll be able to rederive it.

It's a bit of a shame that the LZ78-LZW linage of algorithms basically died out at that point.

Most of modern lossless compression is instead based on the LZ77-LZSS-... linage, which has a massive number of different improvements and variations.

  I had implemented it once in 2 lines of Python. some 25 years ago. If I can shake the rust maybe I'll be able to rederive it.

Please do! I would love to see a concise and readable implementation in Python.

Many good inventions are like that.

Nearly all break through inventions seem obvious in hindsight. I guess putting the pieces together and connecting the dots looking forward is what’s incredibly hard. The search space can still be immense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com