Ask HN: What was the secret that Jan Sloot took with him to the grave?

1 points by VertexRed 9 years ago | 4 comments

This has to be one of the largest (and personally the most interesting) IT myths out there. I have my own belief of what happened (which I might share later), but I'm really interested in reading what others believe went on and how (or if) he was able to actually reduce a full movie down to a fraction of its size.

Brief summary for those who haven't heard of him: Sloot claimed to have invented a system that was able to compress a full digital movie down to 8 KB which he privately demonstrated to different groups several times. He was even in contact with Roel Pieper who was Philips CTO at the time and just before they were about to go big, he passes away.

Jan Sloot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot

lun4r 9 years ago |

He said it wasn't "compressing", but rather called it a "coding system" that used some "reference memory". His early patents describe some mechanism that uses a combination of RLE and references to lines of pixels stored in that reference memory. I haven't seen any materials that suggest something revolutionary. Claims like these have been made many times during the past decades but either got busted or their inventor mysteriously died or disappeared. IMHO just another story for conspiracy theorists :)

VertexRed 9 years ago | |

Another theory that I read was that Sloot had somehow linked analog and digital (he was supposedly a TV technician before) and that he was parameterizing data from an analog signal using a small amount of data.

Source: http://jansloot.telcomsoft.nl/Sources-1/More/CaptainCosmos/N... (comment by Koen near the bottom of the page).

Now conspiracy theory or not; one can't claim that it's not an interesting read since he privately demonstrated it to at least 20 people and was also able to get Philips to work with him.

lun4r 9 years ago | | |

Here's a lot more on Sloot and others: http://www.endlesscompression.com