Having a habit of compulsively wondering approximately every 34.765th day about how zip compression (bzip2 in this case) might be used to measure information contained in data – this time the question popped up in my head of whether or not and if then how permutation of a text’s words would affect its compression ratio. The answer is – it does – and it does so in a very weird and fascinating way.
Lo and behold James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and its peculiar distribution of compression ratios …
