In Silicon Valley, Richard Hendricks creates a revolutionary lossless data compression algorithm for his startup, Pied Piper.
Compression requires prediction.
The better the prediction, the better the compression, whether you are measuring fidelity or result size.
This doesn't mean that compression is prediction.
> Compression, Predictive modeling, or Complexity?
Perhaps a bad example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38400380 :
> "78% MNIST accuracy using GZIP in under 10 lines of code" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37583593
A better title, you can improve your compression if you make an accurate prediction. Much like how a branch predictor can make a CPU do the same work in less time. Or when your symbols are true uncompressable rules of reality (which is probably meaningless both semantically and physically again due to inherent randomness)
The main difference between minimalist and maximalists are how much that set of uncompressable rules gives you. I suspect the search space is too large. What we see in practice is that lossy rules let you cover more ground but eventually you hit a wall and have to move to a lower level of abstraction to make progress. There are 10^360 paths in a go tree, but something like 10^300,000 for molecular chemistry and that's not even all the way up (or down, say 10^3000 for the standard model of physics that's 10^900,000,000 if you want to do chemistry without chemistry abstractions.). Just semiconductor fab is 10^(10^11) so 10^(10^16) with molecular chemistry (think finding an implementation for some sort of desired self assembly outcome). AI can be way way way smarter than humans and there just not be enough energy in the universe to find these needles. So we definitely need abstractions, but those are at odds with predictions and the choice of symbols often introduces abstractions that the designer didn't consider.