October 29, 2018

In lab today we used a text compression simulation to experience how data is compressed.

The song I was required to do was "I want a dollar."

By using trial and error, I compressed part of the message into heuristics that are defined in the dictionary. I avoided compressing characters that were frequent, such as spaces (_) because then, rather than taking up less space, the dictionary would increase in size and the compression rate would lower.

While compressing the text, there wasn't really a set of steps I used to compress it - a lot was trial and error. However my approach to compressing text was important. I would try to get common phrases and words, or arrangements of punctuation and letters. I realized that there was no way to confirm I had the best possible way of compressing text, however in comparison to other methods, I could choose the best way that gave me the highest compression rate. In my case, the highest compression rate was 41.1%, after playing around with the tool more.