Single character compressions

[grepsedawk]

In the example, There is only 1 C that gets compressed into 1C. If we take the knowledge that all "multi character" will have a number, and all singles do not have this prefix number, we can improve the compression ratio of this problem

[otobrglez]

Oooh. That's a nice thought!

If I understand your implication, this could be even better compression; from a compression standpoint.

"AAABBAAC" => "3A2B2AC" oppose to current instruction that say "AAABBAAC" => "3A2B2A1C"

It is a brilliant idea; however... given how far into the challenge itself are we with this it would mean changing/optimising a lot of existing solutions. 😅

I suggest that you submit another example and link to this issue here for others who might look into further optimisation of this challenge.

Sincerly!

• Oto

[grepsedawk]

Likewise, it could be really interesting to see existing code go through refactors to support another piece of functionality!

[otobrglez]

@grepsedawk I'll be giving a talk next week about this thing at virtual Python Meetup Ljubljana April 2022; you are welcome to join and we can have some debate over potential enhancements, improvements and ideas. One thing that I would change or make it differently would be to first improve the test suite. I.e. write all these scripts so that they accept input text and output solution. Treat these scripts/programs as "UNIX" programs etc... This would then provide a nice platform for future evolution, comparisons, benchmarks etc.