Comment by conradev
10 years ago
That's how compression was first explained to me, and it really stuck with me ever since. It was in the context of an image though, and instead of heads, it was red pixels.
What's really cool is that the simple explanation can be extended to explain things like why ciphertext doesn't compress well: because ciphertext has no patterns
Not compression per se, but I remember when I was reverse engineering maps for Chip's Challenge. I would often see a tile (represented as a byte) that was encoded as 0xFF0502. I ended up realizing it meant "Repeat 'tile 2' 5 times." It was fun to figure that out as a kid.