The elements of style (original) (raw)
Analysing compressed data leads to impressive results in linguistics
ZIPPING, as any computer buff knows, enables you to compress a file so that it can be stored efficiently, or sent quickly over the Internet. But Emanuele Caglioti and his colleagues at the University of Rome-La Sapienza have found a more esoteric use for it. Using zipped files, they can identify the authors of documents and reconstruct the family trees of languages.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “The elements of style”
From the February 9th 2002 edition
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