SirNiko has a point there. Experienced gamers form a "ruleset" they expect the game to abide by. Breaking that ruleset is one of the most important devices of game storytelling, whether for horror, humor or just an intellectual puzzle.

WAKE UP TIMMY IT'S CHRISTMAS DAY

http://store.steampowered.com/app/33680/

RIGHT HAHAHA SMALL ADJUSTMENT
13 hours left

(actually 24-28 hours but who's counting right)

It is not a complex riddle
(32 hours remaining)

the ironic part is that I am doing this -exactly- because my gimmicky little platformer appealed to the masses as "witty, and innovative"

but wait

40 hours remain
or 36 I'm not sure

so call me anti-clever I guess

48 hours remain

can it handle a stage, say, the size of a super mario world level?

do i look consumer-oriented now

No, 72.

the topic name sounds like the noise you hear when you realize you are alone at home late at night

He mistook nothing. It's that the entire purpose of the algorithm is to eliminate or at least minimize entropy.

You can't reduce the entropy of a file without removing information from it. What you are doing is shuffle all the file's entropic content into a different representation, which may be larger or smaller than the original file.

Let me see if I understand: This algorithm takes blocks of 64 bytes, sorts the bytes into groups of the same value (possibly from smallest to largest), then stores the groups, RLE compressed (something between 2 and 80 bytes per block), along with the data used to shuffle them (296 bits, or 37 bytes).

This algorithm will obviously do no compression if there are no repeated bytes in the block. Furthermore, Since the position information takes 37 bytes, it needs to be that much more efficient than the regular RLE algorithm.

The only possible case I can envision this happening was a block that contained something like:

ABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABABAB

yes, that stores horribly in RLE. Which is why most compressors do not use RLE.

96 hours remain

june 7

120 hours remain

WAKE UP TIMMY IT'S CHRISTMAS DAY

http://store.steampowered.com/app/33680/

The ultimate compression algorithm: For each file, search every possible Turing machine from smallest to largest, until you find one that generates that file. The decompressor is merely a Turing machine interpreter.

Its skill based, not luck based

So is poker.

What this doesn't mean is that every file in the world will compress to 35 bytes, it just means that after enough passes, every file in the world should be able to be compressed to 35-69 bytes.

Uh, information about each of these "passes" is stored where?

you might as well go the full monty and copy DF's storage method. DF marks each 40x40x1 block as empty or not.

In this case, you'd have a tridimensional array of blocks, each of which points either to null (meaning an empty block) or to a 40x40 array of tiles.

btw Software is not patentable in the US unless tied to a specific hardware setup.

I guess you don't care anyway. Good luck with whatever you're doing.

ahem