the.com/compressibility
How much a thing hates keeping its secrets — the less random, the more it shrinks.
means The degree to which something can be squeezed into less space or fewer bits without losing what matters — in information theory, how much redundancy or pattern can be wrung out of data.
from A chain of Latin-built English: com- ('together') plus premere ('to press'), giving compress, pressed matter forced into a tighter shape, same root you feel in 'press' and 'pressure.' The abstract noun forms stacked on later — '-ible' (capable of) and '-ity' (the state of) — turning a physical squeezing into a measurable quality. Information theory borrowed the word wholesale in the 20th century, repurposing the old feeling of physically crushing something down into the modern idea of crushing data down to its essential, non-redundant core.
- perfect example
- a repeated pattern compresses to almost nothing
- worst case
- random noise cannot be compressed at all
- deep link
- ties directly to entropy and information theory
- real limit
- kolmogorov complexity: the true floor is uncomputable