Read to the end: they aren't actually looking for the best-compressing output, because this quickly devolves into aaaaaaaaaaa. They keep a sliding window over a small portion of recent text and use that.
Basically I think the entire premise falls apart due to that choice--they forced an interesting-looking outcome by adjusting the algorithm until gzip started picking random slabs of letters instead of ever-larger repeating runs.
Basically I think the entire premise falls apart due to that choice--they forced an interesting-looking outcome by adjusting the algorithm until gzip started picking random slabs of letters instead of ever-larger repeating runs.