i have half of a diatribe written regarding the matter of "lempel-ziv" encoding. to give an idea of my thoughts regarding its ostensible "universality", i will relate that until last week i believed it was just one of several distinct stream encoding mechanisms that zstd could employ. it turns out to my dismay and absolutely not to my surprise that the reason ziv and lempel's approach is attractive is because it lets you throw slop into the slop machine
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ziv is first author for both papers but the more curious lexicographic tendency beyond the arbitrary selection of the "LZ" initialism is their desire to reuse the term "universal" like that's a special characteristic. i thought facebook was bad at citing their sources but the 1977 paper has one of the truly most impressive examples of defining your hypothesis in terms of your results i've seen in a long while
for some reason ziv and lempel really do not want to cite claude shannon. the scan i'm reading is from a journal which concludes the lz77 paper with the beginning of another paper "on binary sliding block codes". it directly begins with the words:
Shannon's development of the theory of source coding subject to a fidelity criterion
to describe the "code book" terminology that ziv and lempel adapted but absolutely 100% refused to cite in any way
i found by about 2-3 wiki hops that the voyager golden record was also "published" in 1977. diffie-hellman's "new directions in cryptography" (an example of a great name for a paper which you know contains the juice) would be published in 1976. roe v wade would be "decided" in 1973
i was able to limit myself to a discussion of two paragraphs on the regularity of the cosmic microwave background as justification for the "universe's" bias towards encoding distinct and important context. lz77 is, like much research, developed back to front, where the authors identify their desired hypothesis and work very hard to disprove the alternative
the key thing i had immediately noticed is of course their derogation of statistical distributions by invoking the incantation a priori ad nauseam. they write it with a medium oblique slant and slightly bolder than the surrounding text every single time. they also demonstrate a very impressive degree of conviction that their description of block coding does not rely upon said a priori distributional assumptions
claude shannon's probability distributions over symbol frequencies are portrayed as if they were arbitrary, yet the encoding of sources in lz77 manages to achieve something beyond even gödel by demonstrating a characterization of symbol distributions that cannot be interpreted probabilistically. in their immense modesty, the authors reject the "ranking" of their universal scheme against alternatives "for lack of adequate criteria". yet the final two pages are devoted to a comparison to optimal prefix encoding
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