Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 16:34:17 -0400
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Digitizing a pattern (be it text, a picture, music, whatever) means transforming it into a single number. Quite often a very, very large binary number, but a number nevertheless. You can think of it as the page number of the [book|BookOfBooks] that contains all possible patterns.

Data compression is the black art of finding a smaller page number in a smaller book that corresponds to the original number. If you then give someone the smaller page number and the name[1] of the smaller book, they can find the original page in the Big Book, and therefore retrieve the original pattern.

[1] The name of the book is a [symbol] for how the book is defined, i.e. exactly what subset of the BookOfBooks are contained therein.
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See other InterestingMemes.
