🔗 Weissman Score

The Weissman score is an efficiency metric for lossless compression applications, which was developed for fictional use. It compares both required time and compression ratio of measured applications, with those of a de facto standard according to the data type. It was developed by Tsachy Weissman, a professor at Stanford University, and Vinith Mishra, a graduate student, at the request of producers for HBO's television series Silicon Valley, about a fictional tech start-up.

The formula is the following; where r is the compression ratio, T is the time required to compress, the overlined ones are the same metrics for a standard compressor, and alpha is a scaling constant.

Weissman score was used in Dropbox Tech Blog to explain real-world work on lossless compression.