On: The $5000 Compression Challenge

[compbio]

Yes, if you want to be sure that your solution is correct, you must run the compressor yourself. Then you count the number of collisions it takes to happen upon the correct solution and feed this counter to your decompressor. But then you place the burden of solving the halting problem on yourself and then you got more serious problems than compressing random data.

[jakobegger → compbio]

But your counter will need (X-Y) bits of storage, so you'll need to store Y + (X-Y) bits, or a total of X bits, and you have saved nothing.