Reminds me of when I was about 13 and I had this brilliant idea for an insanely good compression scheme that could handle random data.
I was teaching myself programming using QBasic and I had just discovered the random number function. My idea was essentially to find a random seed which would make the random number generator generate the same byte sequence as the input block. Then you just had to store the random seed, huge win!
Of course, it didn't take me too long until I realized just how long it would take to compress, and I hadn't even thought about the limited number of byte sequences a 16-bit random seed could generate or the fact that the random numbers it would generate aren't all that random...
But for a few hours there I felt really, really clever :)
I was teaching myself programming using QBasic and I had just discovered the random number function. My idea was essentially to find a random seed which would make the random number generator generate the same byte sequence as the input block. Then you just had to store the random seed, huge win!
Of course, it didn't take me too long until I realized just how long it would take to compress, and I hadn't even thought about the limited number of byte sequences a 16-bit random seed could generate or the fact that the random numbers it would generate aren't all that random...
But for a few hours there I felt really, really clever :)