[HN Gopher] The Burrows-Wheeler Transform
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       The Burrows-Wheeler Transform
        
       Author : g0xA52A2A
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2025-10-09 20:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sandbox.bio)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sandbox.bio)
        
       | jansan wrote:
       | For an article describing a compression algorithm this was very
       | digestible and entertaining.
        
         | jakedata wrote:
         | This transformation in and of itself does not perform any
         | compression. In fact it adds an additional string marker to the
         | data. Performing compression on these strings is addressed
         | here:
         | https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15451-f18/lectures/lec25-bwt.pdf#pag...
        
       | foobarian wrote:
       | The unintuitive part of BWT to me was always the reverse
       | operation, which was the only thing the post didn't give
       | intuition for :-)
        
         | raboukhalil wrote:
         | Good point, thanks! I'll add a subsection about the intuition
         | for that.
        
       | fair_enough wrote:
       | Thanks, man! This helps a lot, because as you say the algorithm
       | is not intuitive. The description of the type of data it is very
       | good for is the best value-adding part of this writeup. Greatly
       | appreciated!
        
       | loloquwowndueo wrote:
       | I was once mentioning this transform to someone and they were
       | like "what? The Bruce Willis transform?" - I guess my
       | pronunciation sucked that much.
        
         | Bukhmanizer wrote:
         | Once in a lecture one of my friends asked "You keep mentioning
         | Cooper Netties, who is Cooper Netties?" Everyone was very
         | confused until someone figured out she was asking about
         | Kubernetes.
        
       | raboukhalil wrote:
       | Author here, nice to see the article posted here! I'm currently
       | looking for ideas for other interactive articles, so let me know
       | if think of other interesting/weird algorithms that are hard to
       | wrap your head around.
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-09 23:00 UTC)