News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive.

Re:Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive by tippytippytango on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @03:37PM (#43094765)
If I give you a hard drive full of photos, you could compress them, use the excess hard drive space for your algorithm, then uncompress the photos and give a full hard drive back to me. Is that’s what’s going on here?

Basically it’s exploiting unused channel capacity of the memory if the Shannon entropy isn’t maxed out?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive by Roxxik on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @03:43PM (#43094839)
They are explicitly not assuming anything about the content of the auxiliary space (full hard drive).

So the data might be incompressible and thus compressing it and restoring it afterwards would not work.

Edit: From the paper:

> One natural approach is to compress the data on the hard disk as much as possible, use the freed-up space for your computation and finally uncompress the data, restoring it to its original setting. But suppose that the data is not compressible. In other words, your scheme has to always work no matter the contents of the hard drive. Can you still make good use of this additional space?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive by ycombinatrix on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @09:36PM (#43097927)
Why wouldn't decompressing work? The whole point is that the hard drive is restored to its (arbitrary) original state upon completion.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive by Snoozus on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @01:56AM (#43099356)
Some data is just incompressible, like random numbers, encrypted data or already compressed data.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive by ycombinatrix on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @01:26PM (#43105502)
The compression from GP's comment is irrelevant.

Put arbitrary data in, get the same arbitrary data out.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive by NooneAtAll3 on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @04:49PM (#43095564)
it is indeed one of important techniques in catalyitic computing that either 1)you can compress the catalyst, giving you space or 2)uncompressible catalyst gives you a source of randomness
[ Parent | on HN ]