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It’s not becoming the users that are the decision makers. A few CTOs could make decisions based on this

I think it’s fundamentally hard to make tools like that because models can be sensitive to specifics, so dumbing them down is generally not great

Do you think there is room for a resurgence in linear optimization?

Linear programming, and even integer linear programming are pretty well solved practically speaking.

I agree with the vibes of your comment, but I have to reply to this:

> Unless you’re talking about advanced PR and market manipulation techniques to capture and retain ad revenue

Those very much _are_ the goals at those enterprises.

> making bigger breakthroughs in AI, apps, self-driving cars

Those weren’t really the topics people were interested in at the time (depending on your definition of AI).

The shoulders of giants, as they say.

As do high corporate tax rates

What are you basing such a bold prediction on?

>Which line in the FAQ are you making an analogy to?

The line about filename shenanigans being disallowed.

>A FAQ for the newsgroup is not automatically part of the rules for the challenge.

I think it’s completely clear that this FAQ was about the challenge.

>It's easy to show that in practice some bytes are more common than others (because random)

I don’t follow. Wouldn’t that be (because not random)

>uniform random strings’ K complexity is only _tightly concentrated around_ the strings’ length plus a machine-dependent constant

What is the distribution of the complexity of a string? Is there some Chernof-like bound?

And the FAQ for the bet said that if a team can’t afford to enter the playoffs then the bet is off.

But storing an index for a file of length 2^n takes only n bits, so you need that run of 0’s to be of length n+1 to win

This reminds me of a data compression scheme I came up with once:

Treat an n bit file as a polynomial over the finite field with characteristic 2. Now, there are some irreducible polynomials in this field, but many polynomials have factors of x and of (x+1). Factor the polynomial into P(x)x^n (x+1)^m. and just collect these terms, storing only P, n, and m.

One thing you can do, as the other commenter pointed out, is consider entropy of the file.

However, this restriction is too much for the purposes of this challenge. We don’t actually need a file with low entropy, in fact I claim that a weak file exists for files with entropy 8 (the maximum entropy value) - epsilon for each epsilon > 0.

What we actually need is a sufficiently large chunk in a file to have low entropy. The largeness is in absolute terms, not relative terms.

A very simple file would be taking a very large file with maximum entropy and adding 200 0’s to the end. This would not decrease the entropy of the file much, but it gives way to a compression algorithm that should be able to save ~100 bytes

I feel like if the FAQ requires not using filename shenanigans then the slight of hand was illegal the whole way.