I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat and made it much easier for me to understand this beautiful algorithm than any of the explanations that I had previously encountered. The algorithm The algorithm…

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XOR floating point compression is a simple algorithm that reduces the size of floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values and encoding them in a compressed format using a set of rules. The algorithm achieves good compression by taking advantage of repeated values and removing leading and trailing zeros in the XORed values. The 'max regret' threshold is a heuristic used in the algorithm to reset the window size and optimize compression.

The Simple Beauty of XOR Floating Point Compression