A US start-up company has attracted widespread attention by claiming to have developed a revolutionary new method for compressing data, but experts are sceptical.
ZeoSync says its compression technology can make data many times smaller than existing methods, and can even be used to efficiently compress 鈥渧irtually random鈥� data. Compressing truly random data is not possible according the current mathematical understanding of compression.
However the company has refused to release detailed information about its technique, citing pending patents, which leaves many many scientists cynical of the claims.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 not the first time a company or individual has made very inflated claims and it won鈥檛 be the last,鈥� says Vinay Vaishampayan, a mathematics researcher a AT&T鈥檚 Shannon laboratory in New Jersey, US. 鈥淚 am inclined to be very sceptical.鈥�
ZeoSync claims that its new technique could revolutionise the computer industry, even though it is at an early stage of development and only tested on very small amounts of data.
The company says its technology will be commercially available in 2003 but says it will demonstrate the idea publicly within the next few weeks, to combat widespread scepticism.
Data fragments
Conventional data compression works by finding redundancy within information. Fragments of data that are repeated can be streamlined, and fragments that are unimportant to the final product removed. Some compression technology works by removing data that can be predicted.
John Dyer, of US computer consultants Radical Systems, claims to have successfully performed independent tests of the technology. He has signed an agreement not to reveal any details but says: 鈥淭he approach does not attack redundancy but treats the data as a whole.鈥�
ZeoSync鈥檚 press release also provides only partial clues as to the mystery technology with statements like 鈥淶eoSync intentionally randomises naturally occurring patterns鈥� and 鈥渢he manipulation of binary information and translation to complex multidimensional mathematical entities鈥�.
Vaishampayan says this provides little to go on: 鈥淚鈥檝e read it several times over and it refuses to make sense.鈥�
Data compression is crucial to digital communications and information storage. Finding better ways to compress video, audio and other forms of data could improve the efficiency of data transmission over the internet and increase computers鈥� storage capacity.