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From: d5kwedb@dtek.chalmers.se (Kristian Wedberg)
Newsgroups: comp.compression
Subject: Re: DDJ compression competition FLAME
Message-ID: <1991Apr8.212232.7551@mathrt0.math.chalmers.se>
Date: 8 Apr 91 21:22:32 GMT
References: <1991Apr8.160133.22070@kcbbs.gen.nz>
Sender: news@mathrt0.math.chalmers.se (Evald Nyhetsson)
Organization: Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
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In article <1991Apr8.160133.22070@kcbbs.gen.nz> Peter_Gutmann@kcbbs.gen.nz (Peter Gutmann) writes:
>#flame on  
>  A few days ago I finally managed to get hold of the Feb'91 DDJ.  There were 
>two things about the compression competition that disturbed me:  
>  
>1. The test data is known in advance.  It is thus possible to write a  
>compression program which will compress it arbitrarily well.  

Hello Peter! The rules in the competition reminded me of a joke about
the validation of ADA compilers; to be certified a compiler had simply to
recognize some 2500 programs, and output the correct code. General
functionality wasn't specified...

However, if you send for the test data, I think you'll only receive samples
of text, binary, image files etc, not the actual test data ('test' is the
ambiguous word in the article). Also, they only want the one disc, which
hardly is enough for the real thing.
But this could easily be resolved if a kind
soul would post these files (together with the application form).

>2. The type of system the compressor will be run on (a 25Mhz 386 with 128K  
>cache and 8MB RAM).  This system will *not* determine who can create the best 
>compressor.  What it will determine is who has access to high-end PC hardware;

Here I agree with you: it should have been geared towards practical schemes,
not theoretical ones (since it's more a PROGRAMMING contest than an
algorithmic one). In a Unix-machine you won't have all those MBytes
for yourself, and your compressor slowly kill your drives since most of it
is paged out...

	kitte