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From: jbaker@gmuvax2.gmu.edu (John Baker)
Newsgroups: comp.compression
Subject: Compressing real values?
Message-ID: <1991Apr25.201218.24894@gmuvax2.gmu.edu>
Date: 25 Apr 91 20:12:18 GMT
Reply-To: jbaker@gmuvax2.UUCP (John Baker)
Organization: George Mason Univ. Fairfax, Va.
Lines: 17

We need to compress a series of real values to transfer over a network
for a parallel program in Linda.  The values are somewhat related,
but a maximum difference is not always guaranteed.

What I would like is a program to compress the differences such that
smaller differences take fewer bytes.  This is trivial for integers,
but not necessarily reals.  I would think there would be some variant of
arithmetic coding to do this.

Alternatively, we could assume differences fit into n bits with a
special case if the value is too large, but this method probably would
be less effective.

Any ideas?

John Baker
jbaker@gmuvax2.gmu.edu