this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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I’m not an Information Theory guy, but I am aware that, regardless of how clever one might hope to be, there is a theoretical limit on how compressed any given set of information could possibly be; and this is particularly true for the lossless compression demanded by this challenge.
Quote from the article:
The skepticism is well-founded, said Karl Martin, chief technology officer of data science company Integrate.ai. Martin's PhD thesis at the University of Toronto focused on data compression and security.
Neuralink's brainwave signals are compressible at ratios of around 2 to 1 and up to 7 to 1, he said in an email. But 200 to 1 "is far beyond what we expect to be the fundamental limit of possibility."
The implication of a 200 to 1 algorithm would be that the data they're collecting is almost entirely noise. Specifically that 99.5% of all the data is noise. In theory if they had sufficient processing in the implant they could filter the data down before transmission thus reducing the bandwidth usage by 99.5%. It seems like it would be fairly trivial to prove that any such 200 to 1 compression algorithm would be indistinguishable in function from a noise filter on the raw data.
It's not quite the same situation, but this should show some of the issues with this: https://matt.might.net/articles/why-infinite-or-guaranteed-file-compression-is-impossible/
There is a way they could make the majority of it noise - if they reduced their expectations to only picking up a single type of signal, like thinking of pressing a red button, and tossing anything that doesn't roughly match that signal. But then they wouldn't have their super fancy futuristic human-robot mind meld dream, or dream of introducing a dystopian nightmare where the government can read your thoughts...
The problem isn't "making the majority of it noise",
the problem is tossing-out the actual-noise, & compressing only the signal.
Without knowing what the actual-signal is, & just trying to send all-the-noise-and-signal, they're creating their problem, requiring 200x compression, through wrongly-framing the question.
What they need to actually do, is to get a chip in before transmitting, which does the simplification/filtering.
That is the right problem.
That requires some immense understanding of the signal+noise that they're trying to work on, though, and it may require much more processing-power than they're committed to permitting on that side of the link.
shrug
Universe can't care about one's feelings: making-believing that reality is other than it actually-is may, with politial-stampeding, dent reality some, temporarily, but correction is implacable.
In this case, there's nothing they can do to escape the facts.
EITHER they eradicate enough of the noise before transmission,
XOR they transmit the noise, & hit an impossible compression problem.
Tough cookies.
_ /\ _
NAND - one of the 2 you listed, or they give up.