Text Compression

For our lab, we were each given a poem to compress. We then had to look for patterns, for example, repeated words or phrases within the text. Enter the patterns you see into the dictionary on the right. As you type entries into the dictionary, the symbol for the entry is inserted into the text in place of the pattern. We also learned that compression is a method/protocol for using fewer bits to represent the original information. This can be fulfilled using various methods such as looking for patterns and substituting symbols for the larger patterns of data. It was hard to know when to stop compressing, and it was hard to confirm that we had compressed the poem "enough". So in order for us to know the exact solution we had to come up with a strategy called a "heuristic" to define some rules about when the poem was good enough.