Had an idea - looking for a math buff to tell me if it's possible with today's technology.

[sfouant at shortestpathfirst.net (Stefan Fouant)]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Landon Stewart [mailto:lstewart at superb.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2011 4:08 PM
> To: nanog
> Subject: Had an idea - looking for a math buff to tell me if it's
> possible with today's technology.
> 
> Lets say you had a file that was 1,000,000,000 characters consisting of
> 8,000,000,000bits.  What if instead of transferring that file through
> the
> interwebs you transmitted a mathematical equation to tell a computer on
> the
> other end how to *construct* that file.  First you'd feed the file into
> a
> cruncher of some type to reduce the pattern of 8,000,000,000 bits into
> an
> equation somehow.  Sure this would take time, I realize that.  The
> equation
> would then be transmitted to the other computer where it would use its
> mad-math-skillz to *figure out the answer* which would theoretically be
> the
> same pattern of bits.  Thus the same file would emerge on the other
> end.

Not exactly the same thing, but application acceleration of this sort has
been around for some time - 

http://www.riverbed.com/us/
http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/application-acceleration/wxc-
series/
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5680/Products_Sub_Category_Home.html

Stefan Fouant