These Engineers Just Built Their Own “Pied Piper” Compression Algorithm A team of engineers at Dropbox’s Hack Week re-created the fictional compression schema from HBO’s Silicon Valley.

For example, I can make a 256 kB text file, containing over 260,000 identical characters, and use a file compression tool and the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LMZA) to squash it down to ...

Compression algorithms, such as LZ77 and Huffman, analyze data for redundancies and patterns, allowing them to represent those patterns more efficiently with fewer bits.