You are recreating Kolmogorov complexity there. Kolmogorov complexity is defined as the minimal amount of program (for some programming language) to recreate the given string. By the definition, your strategy will compress the data no better than its Kolmogorov complexity. In this aspect, Kolmogorov complexity measures the data's true randomness. If the random data has been generated correctly its complexity should be near its length, however, so your strategy won't work. (And there is enough evidence that this was the case.) It does not matter whether the data is already known or not; it is the data's inherent randomness prohibiting you to compress it.

To be sure, of course, Patrick Craig did not compress it in the pure information theoretic sense. Mike Goldman failed to equate the goal to that information theoretic compression however.