(sorry, late to the party)

But the real question is: what can we use all this for?
As far as I know, there’s no compression of words to pictures programs out there.

And what about going the other way?
Take an image ( http://tinyurl.com/bg7fy2 ), how do you decompress it to a description of it? If that’s what’s needed, I’m not even sure it is a description that will be decompressed, but some sort of output is needed for sure.

And what about movies? if you need 1000 words for every frame in a movie, it’s gonna be a huge book :)

/Mads

hmm.. that actually makes sense.. i think i’m gonna start annoying artists out there with this..

[quote comment=”11373″]Oh, my… How could I put so many grammatical mistakes in so few words?[/quote]

lol.

Oh, my… How could I put so many grammatical mistakes in so few words?

Actually, words are indeed an abstraction. But pictures led to writing by compressing small schemas into hyeroglyphs, ideograms, then syllabic or alphabetic characters. These were used to represent words and as such they became a new way to compress data. But words in themselves (a sound = an idea) is no compression, that’s true, just abstraction.

My turn:

Words are the compressed forms of pictures. Which takes more time: To draw a picture (or even TAKE a picture) of me…. or to just say “Travis” which instantly creates a mental image of me for you to think of? thus “Travis” instantly decompresses the image in mental form without the need of a physical form which you already started out with.

We already compressed the image of a horse into “horse” in our brain, and if he had never seen a horse, he did after he saw the ..erm… mural on the wall… then they established horse was the name of this so there on out, they could remember the shit painting by “horse”.

I’ll chime in on the “words are compression too”. No, not really. Words are an abstraction method. You name things and you have a common vocabulary of symbols with attached meanings. They facilitate communication rather than compress it.

Words, and language in it’s simplest form are used for abstracting things and actions.

Horse. Me. Me go! Me go horse! Me ride horse!

After you get sophisticated enough you start using words to abstract more complex ideas such as love, duty, commitment, horse shit and etc. It’s like using closures or macros – you are assigning arbitrary chunks of your verbal code to variables. You are not really compressing – you are abstracting.

And whenever you do that, you need to store the definition of that abstraction somewhere. Like in a dictionary. Each of the complex words has a long definition. When you use that word you are essentially using a pointer to that definition.

Images though, don’t have this problem. They can encapsulate concepts and ideas without the need of abstraction, or referring to a definition.

At lest that’s how I see it. :)

I think it goes both ways.
Words can do things that pictures can’t. (But it’s not equal, pictures win by far.)

Damnit, Matt` stole my comment :( <— words + picture = major idea compression

Believable. Though I remember hearing somewhere that research suggested that it had something to do with recording visions and hallucinations.