cortesoft 5 days ago

There is no general purpose compressor that can achieve compression on all random streams of bytes... but there is a possibility to compress a specific random stream of bytes, if you get lucky

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lambdaone 5 days ago

Absolutely! Can this probability be quantified?

benchmarkist 5 days ago

You'd have to define what you mean by luck which would be equivalent to choosing some pattern that your compressor can recognize in a random stream of bytes and then computing the probability that pattern appeared in some random byte sequence. It's not a winnable game in any practical sense because whatever compressor you choose the probability of getting a sequence from your opponent that will conform to the patterns recognizable by your compressor is essentially 0.