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To clear this up: This is exactly how gzip actually works. I wrote a version of gunzip from scratch and just inserted some print statements in the middle to get this visualization.

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If anyone is interested, the part of the source code that produces the visualization is here: https://github.com/jvns/gzip.jl/blob/visualization/gzip.jl#L...

I ended up compiling Julia just so I could watch it in action myself: http://showterm.io/2b572805187a499194e91#fast

Beautiful

THIS IS COOL. I did not know about showterm.io.

You are quite right, I am an idiot.

Frankly, learning about LZW[0][1] and the Burrows-Wheeler Transform[2] was probably one of the highlights of my first undergrad algorithms course. The latter certainly made me feel like an idiot, too.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welc...

[1] For the record, LZW isn't used in gzip; it was the patent-encumbered compression format used in GIF.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transfo... (used in bzip2)

BWT is mindblowing. So many applications; e.g. it's used by pretty much all popular biological sequence alignment software to compress genomes so they fit in memory during the alignment :D

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