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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

"during the last 5 years i’ve been explaining people that it takes less space to write a 3 minutes HD animated video and music clip than than it takes to store a 32×32 pixel icon."

This sounds so wrong. This sentence makes it sound as if any 3 minutes HD video has smaller filesize than a 32x32 pixel icon. Of course people won't believe you if you use that wording.

I assume what you mean to say is, it is possible to create SOME 3 minute video with music that is smaller than SOME 32x32 pixel icon.

E.g. if you store the 32x32 pixel icon in some XML format that describes every single pixel color component, and the video is plain white with some bleep music :p

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Except for the next fucking sentence where he explains it's about algorithmic generation not arbitrary compression. He's assuming his readers have a brain. That might be a false assumption.

Couldn't you just apply the same techniques to generate 1024 pixels in less than the filesize it takes to generate a video?

If he's having trouble explaining it to people, it's because he's not wording it correctly. And if he's wording it correctly he should use the same, correct, understandable wording to tell us.

Yeah. He's not creating a video, he's creating a program that displays a video. If you create a 320x240 program that animation and call it a video, you might as well call every frame an array of 300 16x16 icons.

The point is pretty cool though, algorithmic compression is pretty awesome, especially when you don't have to conform to any particular end result. A fresh Minecraft world is a 240k jar file used as a decompression tool, and the data is a single integer (the seed). In the end the result is some 9 million times the surface area of the Earth.

However, start modifying that world and the data needed to store it balloons. Make a world that accurately mimics the surface of just Iceland and you're going to be looking at a pretty large file.

Accept a world that's a bit of simplex noise and Brownian motion and let yourself be awed. Make a video of rotating around a fractal made from a simple formula - that looks cool. Try and compress a video of your daughter's first steps and you'll get something significantly larger than an icon. Especially an icon that's at least run-length encoded.

There's no real computer science distinction between a program which displays a video and a video. You can always create a video format which (optionally) can read some bytecode and run it in a virtual machine. There are Turing complete font formats you know.

I find it correct and understandable. That's not arrogance. This is basic CS. Reference Kolmogorov complexity. The measure of information relative to a generative basis is the length of the shortest unique representation of a generative description within that basis.

The comment you just replied to was pointing out that you could just as easily find a 32x32 pixel icon with Kolmogorov complexity lower than that of the 3 minute "HD" video. And they did so in a way without having to bring CS theory into what was previously a marvelously straightforward discussion.

This discussion is utterly straightforward basic in CS. I am a self educated high school dropout. I am intolerant to rationalizations of willful ignorance. Take that for what you will, but clearly one of us can do something the other can't, and for me that is telling.

Here's a playable, graphic, first person shooter. It's in 96kb.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger)

Looks like someone has a bad case of the Mondays. On Tuesday.

Yeah, you're right, that was grouchy. My bad. I get frustrated when I see someone post something I find interesting, and then the top HN comment is just someone ignorantly tearing it down.

But couldn't you use algorithmic generation to hold a 32x32 image as well?

There's no need for XML, nor for all-white video. A 32x32 icon of some color noise, stored as PNG, GIF, or BMP, takes about 2-3 KB. Writing an algorithm to procedurally generate a vaguely interesting video and music can easily be done in less than that. Check out the demoscene for numerous examples. Naturally not all videos can be generated this way, but his statement is still true.

This is a great example of the point the guy is making:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36BPql6Nl_U

That's 128 bytes. You could encode that as a 43 pixel RGB888 image. That's less than 7x7 pixel icon!

Now as Jare mentioned in another comment, this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o

contains less bytes than a basic 32-bit 32x32 pixel icon. Some of the whole essence of this demoscene stuff is to work within these constraints(256 bytes, 1024 bytes, 4096 bytes, 64 kbytes, ...) to produce this kind of art. Custom virtual machines, on-fly decompression algorithms and methods, carefully crafted data and ingenious ways of data re-use are the key. It's like black magic.

Also, English isn't his (?first? / only) language.

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