“I don’t understand. What’s that?” “Come on!” John protested. “Don’t pretend you’re a full-blown moron. What’s wrong with your brain?” I looked at the screen of his computer. “I mean, compression algorithms produce binary compressed data, not plain text sentences.” “Precisely,” he replied. “Lemme show you, you dimwitted noob.” He tore a blank sheet from a notepad, took a pen and drew two rperpendicular lines. “This,” he began, “represents the size of the file, and that axis is the information content. All current lossless compressors work on size and preserve the information, this way.” He drew a horizontal line. “Mine goes this way.” He scratched a slanted line. “It compresses both in size and information. In other words, the software tries to understand what’s written in the file it works on and squeezes it into a single catch phrase. It’s a bit like JPEG or MPEG or even MP3, but for text.” “How can you do that?” “I leveraged some of the most recent developments in AI. Look!” He dropped the pen and turned back to the keyboard. With an ease betokening years of uninterrupted practice, he typed: [b]szip --help[/b] And the machine replied: [b]szip, a semantic compressor. © John Warwick 2018.[/b] [b]Usage: szip (flags) inputfile outputfile[/b] [b]-m: map text against a database of quotations.[/b] [b]All common text formats supported. Output in plain text.[/b] [b]john@babe>[/b] “Okay, I don’t need the advanced class,” I said. “Just get straight to the point.” He looked at me with eyes full of contempt. “Technical stuff has never been your cup of tea, eh?” I didn’t answer. “Okay,” he carried on. “Have a load of this. This is [i]Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland[/i]. About 400 kilobytes of text. Are you ready?” Without even waiting for an answer, he typed: [b]szip alice.txt -[/b] There was a slight pause, presumably in order for the software to process the data, then [i]Alice was a bright kid with a wild imagination.[/i] appeared on the screen. I chortled. “This is amazing,” I said, “but I don’t see the point. I mean, maybe it’s fine for the students who want to cheat their exam, but—” “Nah,” he cut in. “This is a great tool to extract the quintessence of any given book. And it’s not biased by any creed, belief or religion… Speaking of which—” He punched a bunch of commands on the keyboard. “So, this is the King James Bible. Are you ready to know the quintessential truth about it?” And without hesitation he committed the order that would submit the holy scripture to the cold, dispassionate inner eye of the computer. [i]God has a sick sense of humour.[/i] popped up on the screen after a minute or so. He didn’t let me time to comment. “With the m option, you can map the contents against a database of famous quotations. Let’s do this again with it.” He recalled the previous command line, modified it and relaunched the process. [i]There’s just enough religion in the world to make men hate one another, but not enough to make them love.[/i] I whistled. “Nice one,” I said. He turned to me. “Did you bring what I asked for?” It took me a half step to figure out what he meant. “Oh, sure!” I said. I dove in my pocket and fished out a thumb drive, that I gave to him. “It’s the EPUB version of the [i]Complete and Comprehensive Human History from 4,000 BC to the Present.[/i] I couldn’t find a most exhaustive volume at the uni’s library. Geez, it’s already over two gigabytes.” “I suppose that’ll do,” John said. With almost supernatural deftness his fingers flew over the keyboard and soon the file was fed into the innards of the computer. “Fine,” he said. “This is going to take a couple of hours. Best thing is that you go back home and I’ll phone you tomorrow morning.” [hr] When my cellphone rang the next morning, I eagerly answered. It was John alright, and his voice was carrying overtones of excitement and mirth with it. “You won’t believe it,” he said. “Best compressing ratio ever achieved!” “Eh,” I replied. “What is it?” I heard him snicker. Then he said: “It output just one five letter word! A two gigabyte EPUB down to five letters! Awesome!” “Oh come on, spit it out!” “Snafu!”