The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)
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ticc.uvt.nl
A TV-repair man working for over 20 years as a recluse in his attic. When his invention was ready for demo's, Roel Pieper was one of the first to take a look at it. He almost fell out of his chair and said "This is it!" when the device showed 16 movies running at different speeds. He quit his job at Philips later that week to form a company around the invention of Sloot.
Had Jan Sloot really found a new and novel way to store information, beating Shannon's law? Vector graphics? Pre-storing the code book? Or was that only the hook to get as much investors behind it and make a few really really rich?
I think the system was entirely within information theory laws. To see this, we look at a former invention of Sloot. As a TV-repair man he had to buy the schematics for the TV's he was working on. These schematics came on a CD or floppy disk. Sloot patented a device that had all the schematics of every TV already on it in a heavily compressed form. To "unlock" a schematic, one could call a phone number and receive a small keycode that one would enter. This would remove all the hassle of individual data carriers like CD's and floppies, which was a huge market at the time.
I believe the Sloot Digital Coding System was to be a setup-box for media and software. A commercial PirateBay of sorts. You would download (or bring in your device to a local shop) encrypted versions of the latest software and movies. Then you could simply call a number or buy a chip card to unlock a movie you wanted to see. A CD-I Netflix 10 years before Netflix.
This would have made the DVD market redundant. Like a Dolby Surround chip build into all sorts of electronics, so would this technology be licensed to other manufacturers.
The only (and very big) problem was that Jan Sloot did not get to really finish his update-code. How to efficiently and automatically update the database of these devices? A team could have probably worked around it, but Jan Sloot kept to himself and was enormously paranoid. He did not allow Faraday cage tests to rule out suitcase transmitters. He claimed they could be used to reverse engineer his simple invention.
The source-code for the device was never found. In the locker that PI's expected it to be, they found a John Grisham novel, and the only device ever opened after Sloot's death, contained a simple harddrive.
Jan Sloot's attic room was cleaned the day after he died. All his papers, chips and devices were taken. The widow of Jan Sloot and her son have no clue were it went.
Why do you believe this? The argument that 2^1024 is a very large number, but that the number of possible movies is larger than this strikes me as fairly compelling.
To see this, we look at a former invention of Sloot. ... Sloot patented a device that had all the schematics of every TV already on it in a heavily compressed form.
This would seem to involve compressing PDF of the schematics, and then encrypting each with a password that is specific to the disk and the schematic. Positing the existence of a secure database that keeps track of which password works for each document on each user's disk, and assuming that the total size of the compressed documents doesn't exceed the capacity of the disk, this seems plausible. But I don't why this would have us believe in the infinite movie device.
Secondly, why would patent status of this earlier device encourage us to believe in a second purported invention that most (all?) experts in the field believe to be impossible? Are the patent examiners greater authorities than the experts? Even if the second invention itself was patented, this would influence me less than the fact that he secured multiple investors who parted with real money --- which I think is an interesting point in Sloot's favor, but one that can explained by human psychology and greed.
Since you have a new account, my first presumption was that you were trolling, which I'd define as pretending to believe an untenable position to see if you can get a rise out of others. But degree of detail and excitement in this and your couple earlier comments makes me doubt this, and think instead that you believe what you say. Without trying to be too offensive, who are you, and why did you write this comment?
It is compelling, because it is probably true. I think Sloot did not manage to create a device that could play movies to be released in the future, without requiring an update to the device.
> But I don't why this would have us believe in the infinite movie device.
The infinite movie device was a ruse. A misinterpretation of the claims by media and investors, which the company did nothing to stop. Jan Sloot never claimed higher compression ratio's than 8x (you can compress the entire series of Lost better with a single code-book than each single episode with its own code-book). He talked more about encoding, not compression.
> Are the patent examiners greater authorities than the experts?
I think the information theory experts are railing against a claim that was never made. A device that holds every movie ever made, or to be made in the future, unlock-able by a tiny keycode, can not possibly exist. I think Pieper, Perkins and the Oracle DB experts knew this. Apparently there was more to this invention than this ridiculous claim of near infinite compression.
> human psychology and greed
I think this was a different pre-bubble time, where people thought they could invest and hype up companies, and have the technology build later. Speech recognition companies were worth millions before their tech was even proven to practically work. I suspect that such a force worked behind the scenes in this company too. Just see the corny time-capsule that is their flash site (warning, plays sound): http://www.davoc.com/indexnow.html
> my first presumption was that you were trolling, which I'd define as pretending to believe an untenable position to see if you can get a rise out of others
I am sorry for not making my ideas about this case more clear. For the record: I do not think that endless or recursive compression is possible. I am just trying to apply Occam's razor to this intriguing case: Was Jan Sloot the biggest conman of the 90s? Fooling the biggest venture capital companies in the world? Did he really romantically invent something special as an outsider? Or was his set-top box idea really worth something? I don't believe Pieper could be fooled by such a con. Maybe he knew?
> Without trying to be too offensive, who are you, and why did you write this comment?
I am anonymous. Not trying to rile you up, but prefer to keep it that way. I have, not too recently, abandoned an old HN account and starting over. I wrote this comment, because this case is intriguing, and for me, responsible for my attraction to compression and information theory. I first heard about the Pigeonhole principle in relation to this case.
For me, the interesting technical question here (separate from whether it was Sloot's 'invention') is what the limits of video compression are when one is willing to accept a great deal of lossiness. The limits for lossless compression are reasonably understood (I think?), and there are information theoretic bounds for certain types and amounts of loss, but once human perception is in the mix I wonder if there might be compression technologies sufficiently close to magic.
Not really. Call it what you want, but the claim was that you could fit many movies in the same space as one small one (by today's standards), presumably based on similar content shared across multiple movies. Suppose I record a movie of me walking through my city for an hour, and you record one of close-ups of surfers. I find it highly unlikely that you could find a non-trivial amount of duplicate frame content between the two.
Now let's mix in frames from Un Chien Andalou. I'd bet that the union of our three movies' compression dictionaries would be approximately the size of the sum of them.
> Was Jan Sloot the biggest conman of the 90s?
He was quite possibly sincere, but he was still wrong. He was squaring a circle and it just can't be done.
A block of 8x8 pixels, possibly with some filters, could easily repeat, say, a piece of the blue sky. Think of compressing three modern-day English books. Compressing each of them individually with their own table would likely result in a larger size than compressing the three books together with one big table. The compressor can make use of repetition of data across the three books to keep the file size smaller. You can test this with a good compressor. It's a principle that is used in normalized compression distance (comparing the length of individually compressed files, by the length of compressing their concatenation, to obtain a similarity metric).
And this was backed by a comp sci professor. The only explanation I can see is that greed can blind people to anything they don't want to see.
Pieper has a Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper]. It describes him as primarily an "IT-Entrepreneur". He seems to be mostly an investor/business type.
And (from the WP article):
> On 1 September 1999 Pieper was appointed as a professor of Electronic Commerce, a newly created chair at the faculty of informatics and technology management of the University of Twente. Pieper ended as a professor of business administration and corporate governance at the university of Twente in 2013.
It would make more sense to just create a large book by concatenating the pages. And then make the large number at once. In that case you only don't know which pages belong to which book, but separating on that level will probably be easier. :-)
The same way any archive tool like 'tar' knows where one file stops and another begins in a bitstream.