

The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004) - rvschuilenburg
http://ticc.uvt.nl/~pspronck/sloot.html

======
compbio
An incredibly fascinating story. Tom Perkins: "Mister Sloot, you have done an
unbelievable job. You are going to be the richest man on earth."

A TV-repair man working for over 20 years as a recluse in his attic. When his
invention was ready for demo's, Roel Pieper was one of the first to take a
look at it. He almost fell out of his chair and said "This is it!" when the
device showed 16 movies running at different speeds. He quit his job at
Philips later that week to form a company around the invention of Sloot.

Had Jan Sloot really found a new and novel way to store information, beating
Shannon's law? Vector graphics? Pre-storing the code book? Or was that only
the hook to get as much investors behind it and make a few really really rich?

I think the system was entirely within information theory laws. To see this,
we look at a former invention of Sloot. As a TV-repair man he had to buy the
schematics for the TV's he was working on. These schematics came on a CD or
floppy disk. Sloot patented a device that had all the schematics of every TV
already on it in a heavily compressed form. To "unlock" a schematic, one could
call a phone number and receive a small keycode that one would enter. This
would remove all the hassle of individual data carriers like CD's and
floppies, which was a huge market at the time.

I believe the Sloot Digital Coding System was to be a setup-box for media and
software. A commercial PirateBay of sorts. You would download (or bring in
your device to a local shop) encrypted versions of the latest software and
movies. Then you could simply call a number or buy a chip card to unlock a
movie you wanted to see. A CD-I Netflix 10 years before Netflix.

This would have made the DVD market redundant. Like a Dolby Surround chip
build into all sorts of electronics, so would this technology be licensed to
other manufacturers.

The only (and very big) problem was that Jan Sloot did not get to really
finish his update-code. How to efficiently and automatically update the
database of these devices? A team could have probably worked around it, but
Jan Sloot kept to himself and was enormously paranoid. He did not allow
Faraday cage tests to rule out suitcase transmitters. He claimed they could be
used to reverse engineer his simple invention.

The source-code for the device was never found. In the locker that PI's
expected it to be, they found a John Grisham novel, and the only device ever
opened after Sloot's death, contained a simple harddrive.

Jan Sloot's attic room was cleaned the day after he died. All his papers,
chips and devices were taken. The widow of Jan Sloot and her son have no clue
were it went.

~~~
nkurz
_I think the system was entirely within information theory laws._

Why do you believe this? The argument that 2^1024 is a very large number, but
that the number of possible movies is larger than this strikes me as fairly
compelling.

 _To see this, we look at a former invention of Sloot._ ... _Sloot patented a
device that had all the schematics of every TV already on it in a heavily
compressed form._

This would seem to involve compressing PDF of the schematics, and then
encrypting each with a password that is specific to the disk and the
schematic. Positing the existence of a secure database that keeps track of
which password works for each document on each user's disk, and assuming that
the total size of the compressed documents doesn't exceed the capacity of the
disk, this seems plausible. But I don't why this would have us believe in the
infinite movie device.

Secondly, why would patent status of this earlier device encourage us to
believe in a second purported invention that most (all?) experts in the field
believe to be impossible? Are the patent examiners greater authorities than
the experts? Even if the second invention itself was patented, this would
influence me less than the fact that he secured multiple investors who parted
with real money --- which I think is an interesting point in Sloot's favor,
but one that can explained by human psychology and greed.

Since you have a new account, my first presumption was that you were trolling,
which I'd define as pretending to believe an untenable position to see if you
can get a rise out of others. But degree of detail and excitement in this and
your couple earlier comments makes me doubt this, and think instead that you
believe what you say. Without trying to be too offensive, who are you, and why
did you write this comment?

~~~
compbio
> The argument that 2^1024 is a very large number, but that the number of
> possible movies is larger than this strikes me as fairly compelling.

It is compelling, because it is probably true. I think Sloot did not manage to
create a device that could play movies to be released in the future, without
requiring an update to the device.

> But I don't why this would have us believe in the infinite movie device.

The infinite movie device was a ruse. A misinterpretation of the claims by
media and investors, which the company did nothing to stop. Jan Sloot never
claimed higher compression ratio's than 8x (you can compress the entire series
of Lost better with a single code-book than each single episode with its own
code-book). He talked more about encoding, not compression.

> Are the patent examiners greater authorities than the experts?

I think the information theory experts are railing against a claim that was
never made. A device that holds every movie ever made, or to be made in the
future, unlock-able by a tiny keycode, can not possibly exist. I think Pieper,
Perkins and the Oracle DB experts knew this. Apparently there was more to this
invention than this ridiculous claim of near infinite compression.

> human psychology and greed

I think this was a different pre-bubble time, where people thought they could
invest and hype up companies, and have the technology build later. Speech
recognition companies were worth millions before their tech was even proven to
practically work. I suspect that such a force worked behind the scenes in this
company too. Just see the corny time-capsule that is their flash site
(warning, plays sound):
[http://www.davoc.com/indexnow.html](http://www.davoc.com/indexnow.html)

> my first presumption was that you were trolling, which I'd define as
> pretending to believe an untenable position to see if you can get a rise out
> of others

I am sorry for not making my ideas about this case more clear. For the record:
I do not think that endless or recursive compression is possible. I am just
trying to apply Occam's razor to this intriguing case: Was Jan Sloot the
biggest conman of the 90s? Fooling the biggest venture capital companies in
the world? Did he really romantically invent something special as an outsider?
Or was his set-top box idea really worth something? I don't believe Pieper
could be fooled by such a con. Maybe he knew?

> Without trying to be too offensive, who are you, and why did you write this
> comment?

I am anonymous. Not trying to rile you up, but prefer to keep it that way. I
have, not too recently, abandoned an old HN account and starting over. I wrote
this comment, because this case is intriguing, and for me, responsible for my
attraction to compression and information theory. I first heard about the
Pigeonhole principle in relation to this case.

~~~
kstrauser
> He talked more about encoding, not compression.

Not really. Call it what you want, but the claim was that you could fit many
movies in the same space as one small one (by today's standards), presumably
based on similar content shared across multiple movies. Suppose I record a
movie of me walking through my city for an hour, and you record one of close-
ups of surfers. I find it highly unlikely that you could find a non-trivial
amount of duplicate frame content between the two.

Now let's mix in frames from Un Chien Andalou. I'd bet that the union of our
three movies' compression dictionaries would be approximately the size of the
sum of them.

> Was Jan Sloot the biggest conman of the 90s?

He was quite possibly sincere, but he was still wrong. He was squaring a
circle and it just can't be done.

~~~
compbio
Jan Sloot claimed a compression factor of around 8x in his patents. The claim
in the news article is "All movies ever made would fit on one CD-ROM", which
is incorrect and misleading. "The keycodes to unlock all movies ever made
would fit on one CD-ROM" would be correct and totally possible, just like all
magnet links on the PirateBay probably fit on a single DVD.

A block of 8x8 pixels, possibly with some filters, could easily repeat, say, a
piece of the blue sky. Think of compressing three modern-day English books.
Compressing each of them individually with their own table would likely result
in a larger size than compressing the three books together with one big table.
The compressor can make use of repetition of data across the three books to
keep the file size smaller. You can test this with a good compressor. It's a
principle that is used in normalized compression distance (comparing the
length of individually compressed files, by the length of compressing their
concatenation, to obtain a similarity metric).

------
kstrauser
TL;DR "Perfect infinite compression is impossible, but we're calling our
perfect infinite compression scheme something different so that doesn’t
count."

And this was backed by a comp sci professor. The only explanation I can see is
that greed can blind people to anything they don't want to see.

~~~
t__r
Pieper was not a comp sci professor. He was a professor of eCommerce. I
followed some of his lectures during my CS master. The sloot story caused
quite some giggles among us students. It was obviously bullshit. But nobody
had the guts to ask him about it during these lectures.

~~~
kstrauser
I'll take your word for it, but the article explicitly says he was.

~~~
ggchappell
The article stretches the definition of "computer science professor" a bit too
much.

Pieper has a Wikipedia article
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper)].
It describes him as primarily an "IT-Entrepreneur". He seems to be mostly an
investor/business type.

And (from the WP article):

> On 1 September 1999 Pieper was appointed as a professor of Electronic
> Commerce, a newly created chair at the faculty of informatics and technology
> management of the University of Twente. Pieper ended as a professor of
> business administration and corporate governance at the university of Twente
> in 2013.

------
tluyben2
Just after this happened, my company (in the Netherlands) got at least 5 calls
I know of of people who claimed to have the Sloot secret. One of them I hope I
saved from personal doom after he walked into our office to see if we were
good enough to create his software; he was planning on taking a second
mortgage on his house and quitting his job for a very bad idea. A lot of
people (exclusively non programmers) got swallowed up by the romantic idea of
changing the world with this idea which disappeared somewhere and so must be
retrievable again with enough thinking. And the direction was given by Sloot;
the aforementioned (the only one I personally talked to) person read book 'De
Broncode' (the sourcecode) 100s of times, going over every page with a tooth
comb in order to distill the idea he finally thought was the actual algorithm.
I know several people as well who invested in assorted misguided individuals
who said they recreated 'the code'. Our office was in Nieuwegein (where Sloot
lived (and died)) which probably made it quite a bit 'hotter' in that
neighbourhood than elsewhere, but it was definitely interesting.

------
drv
The "Sloot Digital Coding System" is clearly hokum, but the "alien's stick"
story is more or less the same as arithmetic coding - except instead of a
notch on a stick, the fraction is stored as a sequence of bits, so it's not
magically infinite precision.

------
MrQuincle
The concatenation of the numbers wouldn't work. How would you know which part
of the huge floating point number would correspond to a book?

It would make more sense to just create a large book by concatenating the
pages. And then make the large number at once. In that case you only don't
know which pages belong to which book, but separating on that level will
probably be easier. :-)

~~~
gwern
> The concatenation of the numbers wouldn't work. How would you know which
> part of the huge floating point number would correspond to a book?

The same way any archive tool like 'tar' knows where one file stops and
another begins in a bitstream.

~~~
MrQuincle
You mean you have to include a header before each book? And pad it with zeros?
That wasn't in the concatenation manual. :-)

------
toolslive
Rumor has it he was murdered, either by investors who discovered it didn't
work or either by 'the industry'.

~~~
Rygu
I wonder where the investment money ("millions") went. Knowing that, probably
means knowing the truth.

------
tumes
Sooo pretty much Borges' Library of Babel.
[http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/library_of_babel.html](http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/library_of_babel.html)

