If one pixel is bright green, the next one over is likely to be as well. The actual information contained in the image is much less than 4 million numbers’ worth—and it’s precisely this fact that makes it possible* to have compression, the critical mathematical technology that allows images, videos, music, and text to be stored in much smaller spaces than you’d think. The presence of correlation makes compression possible; actually doing it involves much more modern ideas, like the theory of wavelets developed in the 1970s and ’80s by Jean Morlet, Stéphane Mallat, Yves Meyer, Ingrid
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