Zip It! - Finding File Similarity Using Compression Utilities - Computerphile
Using file compression utilities, one can measure the similarity between genomes or texts by comparing the lengths of compressed concatenated files versus separately compressed files, revealing phylogenetic trees and language family trees.
MAIN POINTS FROM TRANSCRIPT
- File compression utilities like zip can measure file complexity through compression ratios.
- Comparing compressed lengths of concatenated files reveals similarity between data sets.
- This method can generate phylogenetic trees using genome data.
- Language family trees can be derived by compressing translated texts.
TAKEAWAYS
- Lossless compression retains all original data, unlike lossy formats like JPEG.
- Compression algorithms identify repeated patterns to reduce file size.
- The method is versatile, applicable to various data types beyond genomes.
- Off-the-shelf compression tools can reliably analyze evolutionary and linguistic relationships.