Commenter questions search completeness of beam approach
1 Sep 22 3:40 AM · 1d ago · 1 article · 1 post · 2 comments · 2 sources · development 1 of 4
A Hacker News user raises a technical concern about whether the beam search explores enough of the possible sequence space to find truly optimal compressions, noting the search may only provide a lower bound on gzip's effectiveness as a plausibility tester.
“It turns out, kind of? It's not exactly coherent text, but it clearly knows something about the text. Much more than I expected gzip to know.”
Nathan Pemberton · hn ↗Nathan Pemberton Researcher/author
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Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 1 claim were published in its stretch
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2 outlets Can gzip be a language model?
first by HN Best, 2d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people said 3 voices · verbatim
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give it a normal text prompt, and it continues that prompt by searching for the byte sequences that compress best. One moment, how are we supposed to know how well that search was done? There is no way to search a meaningful part of the search space.So the result only gives us some lower bound of how well gzip works as a "plausibility tester" of a…
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I'm more interested in the converse question: how well does an LLM perform as a compressor, compared to gzip (ignoring its insanely lower speed)?
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This tracks perfectly with Winrar being more profitable than OpenAI... coincidence? I think not!
All 4 developments of Researcher demonstrates gzip as functional language model… →
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