Fingerprinting

Abstract

This chapter presents a method that condenses large data sets so that they can be represented by only a few bits. This extreme compression comes with a loss of information, however the condensed data can, for example, be used in order to check whether two large data sets are identical by exchanging only a few bits of information - just like fingerprints are used to distinguish and identify humans. In the example in this chapter the data set is a long piece of text. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.