A Partial Hstry of Losy Compression

Summary form only given. The title exemplifies the topic as it is easily recognized as compressed from possible English original versions. It also exemplifies some difficulties. A small sampling of readers all thought "Losy" was a corruption of "Lossy," which is consistent with the apparent loss of letters in "Hstry" and "Losy". But while "Hstry" is compressed, it is not really lossy since it can almost certainly be decoded into "History" (as my spell checker does). Moreover, "Losy" need not be "Lossy" - an equally good candidate in terms of minimizing Levenshtein distance is "Lousy" - so this talk could be a history of lousy compression, lossless or lossy. There are also problems in the uncompressed words. "Partial" has neither compression nor evident losses, but it has ambiguous meaning: it could equally well mean "incomplete" or "biased." So the title is not uniquely decodable, which equally favors "lossy" (since you cannot guarantee an accurate reconstruction) or "lousy" (since lossy coding of English seems a bad idea). This talk will embrace the ambiguity of the title.