January 10, 2002, 5:15 PM — ZeoSync Corp. on Monday achieved something that mathematicians and computer scientists have claimed for 50 years is impossible: multi-pass, 100:1 compression of files without losing any data.
If it actually works, ZeoSync's system could compress files multiple times, making the files up to 100 times smaller than the original, and without losing any data, which is unavoidable with many current compression schemes.
But since the announcement, PhDs and analysts have said, often forcefully, that ZeoSync is wrong. ZeoSync, however, promises that proof -- in the form of demonstrations and products -- will begin to appear soon.
If ZeoSync is right and it has achieved this breakthrough, a revolution in storage and communication could be in the offing, according to analysts and those involved in the work. With this sort of compression, video-on-demand and other high-bandwidth applications could be available over standard phone line modems and wouldn't require broadband connections, according to David Hill, research director of storage and storage management at the research firm Aberdeen Group Inc. But, many long-time observers of compression technology say, seemingly too-good-to-be-true advances in the field have come -- and gone unsuccessfully -- before.
The details of how exactly ZeoSync's technology works are murky. In its press release announcing the "breakthrough", the West Palm Beach, Florida-based company provided a complex explanation, saying that the technology "intentionally randomizes naturally occurring patterns to form entropy-like random sequences" and then "encodes these singular-bit-variance strings within complex combinatorial series to result in massively reduced ... equivalents." The technology would be included in chips, for encoding and decoding, the company said.
When asked to explain what that meant in layman's terms, ZeoSync Chairman and Chief Executive Office Peter St. George provided an explanation that would, no doubt, confuse a layman: That the company's technology takes data files and "creates multidimensional constructs" out of them.
Jim Dyer, the Arkansas director of Radical Systems Inc., who also worked on the project doing both testing and development, explained that unlike traditional compression schemes which seek to remove redundancy to achieve their compression, ZeoSync's technology attacks data packets as a whole, allowing them to be compressed more than once. Standard compression schemes can only compress files once. Radical has worked as a subcontractor with ZeoSync for about two and a half years on this project, Dyer said.
Though ZeoSync has briefed a number of analysts about its technology, the company hasn't shown them enough details to substantiate its claims, said Aberdeen's Hill. Hill, who was briefed last week, said that he "(doesn't) know enough (about the technology) to be able to determine feasibility" because ZeoSync did not provide a working demo.
Other analysts take a dimmer view of ZeoSync not presenting more data. Eric Scheirer, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. who was briefed on the technology on Tuesday, said "all of their materials are hidden beneath a very thin layer of obfuscation" and that when he pressed them for more details, their terminology became fuzzy. He also said that the company claimed a number of details were covered under its "proprietary" methods and therefore could not discuss them.
Talking to ZeoSync was "a lot of going around in circles," he said.
"There's absolutely no chance that ZeoSync has accomplished what they've claimed," said Scheirer, who holds a PhD in audio compression from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers on the subject. "It's simply impossible."
ZeoSync's St. George, however, has heard the skeptics and says that they are wrong. St. George, who has been working on the research for 12 years -- just over two of those years with ZeoSync -- claims that what his company says it has done is possible "because we took an approach that took us out of the box that everyone was living in."
"People want to define themselves by limitations," he said. "(People) want to put (themselves) in a small tank because then we're a big fish."
St. George certainly does come from outside the box of the traditional mathematician. He holds no college degree, though he says he did attend both Syracuse University and the University of Utah for three years each. He is entirely self-taught when it comes to mathematics, he says.
