Prediction is compression, compression is expression
Relating some ideas that I’ve been thinking about lately regarding the relationship between one’s mental representations, skill development, and expression.
Prediction allows you to express a seemingly large amount of information in a smaller way via the parameters of whatever model you are using to predict.
Perfect prediction is analogous to lossless compression, while imperfect prediction corresponds to lossy compression.
So whenever you have any sort of way of better predicting the future than chance, it corresponds to a better data compression algorithm for that type of data, where you store the same amount of information in your bits. – Prediction = Compression