HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

This is a fun video from a series on compression that explains it well, and features Mike Burrows:

https://youtu.be/4WRANhDiSHM

He shares the origin of the algorithm as well as a story about how it was first published.

The Compressor Head video series is the best introduction to compression that I’ve found.

⬐ visarga

That was great. It's one of the greatest things about YouTube that you can find such videos on it.

⬐ dkural

This algorithm is widely used in genomics. Here's an explanation by Ben Langmead, a computational biologist, with some Python code as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n7NPk5lwbI

The original paper, interestingly, only published as a report:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-124.pdf

⬐ dalke

Fun! Now I'm going to watch the whole 'Compressor Head' series. Thanks, Googler Developers!

⬐ jldugger

Finally, an explanation that kinda sorta makes sense of why it's reversable.

⬐ dnautics

if only it explained how it works!

⬐ daemonk

Wow this is a great video. I was able to implement a simple python version of the BWT as described in the video here:

https://gist.github.com/damiankao/908fe1fd6562dc75f40c