The “information explosion” noted in recent years makes it essential that storage requirements for all information be kept to a minimum. A fully automatic and rapid three-part compressor which can be used with “any” body of information to greatly reduce slow external storage requirements and to increase the rate of information transmission through a computer is described in this paper. The system will also automatically decode the compressed information on an item-by-item basis when it is required.
The three component compressors, which can be used separately to accomplish their specific tasks, are discussed: NUPAK for the automatic compression of numerical data, ANPAK for the automatic compression of “any” information, and IOPAK for further compression of information to be stored on tape or cards.
P. A. D. de Maine
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The self-judgment method of curve fitting
A computer-oriented method for processing and communicating numerical data is described. The Instrument Reliability Factors (IRF), which exactly define the limits of reliability of each measured item of information, are used to compute the Maximum Permitted Error (MPE) associated with each value of each ordinate. The Self-Judgment Principle (SJP) is used to discard wrong information and to compute mean values of the parameters and their MPE's in terms of the IRF. Data compatibility tests with any number of different equations can be made quickly. Otherwise intractable problems are easily solved, and the design of many experiments is greatly simplified.
The computational and mathematical techniques used to reduce bias in the SJP are discussed. Inadequacies in the statistical and graphical methods of curve fitting are noted.
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