Scientific Advancement

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Scientific or Technological Advancement

Overview

Trantor is an information technology services company. Our code has found utility in systems ranging from telecommunications to electronic commerce. The company was founded to develop working software development tools. Advancements made by our company would generally fall under the category of **‘Information Technology’**.

The specific advancements embodied in the work described here involve **data compression, data security, data integrity**, and the associated methods, tools and data to render our ideas in working software.

Despite advances in recent years, software development still remains something of a black art. The transformation of algorithms into software is still a labor intensive effort involving much trial and error. The only proven way to develop working non-trivial software is to build and test.

Our formal methodology is similar to the diagram pictured here and consistent with industry practice. However, even with a formalized method of development, there can be a considerable amount of re-design and re-write prior to delivering finished working software. **We submit that *any* novel, non-trivial software that actually performs a useful function must come as the result of considerable research effort and is a de-facto advancement of technology.**

We would furthermore submit that by virtue of archival sources and test data, working software embodies the best record of its own design and development.

Technological Advancement

Data compression is a vital technology. It is used in a wide variety of contexts for data transmission and storage. The extent to which data can be compressed varies with the input stream. Current compression ratios for ‘lossless’ compression are approximately **2:1 on average**. Typical measures that we have made bear this out. **Any improvement upon compression ratios typical of current techniques would represent a breakthrough with significant economic, social and technological benefits. We feel that there is a small, but finite chance that our techniques will yield better compression ratios.**

As an exercise in advancing technology, we feel that the suite of tools required as scaffolding for our investigations represent meaningful incremental progress. Current technology makes assumptions about the character of compression and the packaging of data based upon current trends as pictured below.

Our proposed tools do not make the same assumptions. Should a breakthrough occur that requires larger resources for encode, decode or both, our approach accounts for that.

Scientific Advancement

Ours is a technological brute force approach to finding a technique to exploit a simple empirical fact: It is possible to compress an **‘incompressible’ data stream** under certain special circumstances. Our investigations have been undertaken to attempt to define what is possible with respect to this initial observation.

As stated in the overview, we are a **technology** company. We are not currently poised to investigate the ramifications of our work from the viewpoint of pure science or mathematics. Our approach is a technological one. **Should we discover a working technology that manages to compress data streams beyond the theoretical limits embodied in current technology, this would also constitute a bona-fide advancement in information theory.**

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