Facebook Unveils Superpack, a New Compression Technique

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook unveiled a new compression technique they call 'Superpack compression.' In a blog post written by software engineer Sapan Bhatia, they claim that their compression improves Android app size by 20% over the default Zip compression used by Android. The post gives an overview of the compression ideas. The basis of these ideas is called out to be a key insight in Kolmogorov Complexity, that any data can be represented in the form of programs that generate that data. Facebook's tool, Superpack, mines out such small programs and optimizes them using compiler techniques.

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