Reminds me of my genius compression algorithm from when I was around 12. Information on the computer is just numbers right? So why not just divide the number by two over and over until its in the single digits. Infinite compression. The only thing left to figure out is how to compress all the remainders from the numbers that aren't divisible by two.
Needless to say, I never could solve that problem.
No no, you need to store the CRC and the output of an object recogniser. A 16 byte CRC plus the word "cat" will have way way fewer collisions!
To decompress you then just had to find the string of bytes that generated a matching CRC code.
It seemed so brilliant, but something told me it was too good to be true, and surely someone would have come up with this before me... So I tried figuring out why it wouldn't work. Still, took me a day or so before I figured out how long "just" was and that collisions would render it moot anyway.
Learned a lot from that though, as an aspiring programmer.