The Sloot Digital Coding System is an alleged data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — which, if true, would dramatically disprove Shannon's source coding theorem , a widely accepted principle of information theory that predicts how much data compression of a digital file is mathematically possible. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen – 11 July 1999, Nieuwegein ), a Netherlands electronics engineer. Several demonstrations of his coding system convinced high-profile investors to join his company, but a few days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified, and the playback device he used for demonstrations was found to have contained a hard disk drive , contrary to what he told investors.
20-444: Sloot may refer to: Sloot Digital Coding System , an alleged data sharing technique Courtney Vandersloot (born 1989), American basketball player See also [ edit ] Vandersloot Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Sloot . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change
40-683: A lookup table for coding and decoding; each word or phrase has one or more strings which replace it. To decipher messages written in code, corresponding copies of the codebook must be available at either end. The distribution and physical security of codebooks presents a special difficulty in the use of codes compared to the secret information used in ciphers , the key , which is typically much shorter. The United States National Security Agency documents sometimes use codebook to refer to block ciphers ; compare their use of combiner-type algorithm to refer to stream ciphers . Codebooks come in two forms, one-part or two-part: The earliest known use of
60-524: A codebook of 30,000 code groups superencrypted with 30,000 random additives. The book used in a book cipher or the book used in a running key cipher can be any book shared by sender and receiver and is different from a cryptographic codebook. In social sciences, a codebook is a document containing a list of the codes used in a set of data to refer to variables and their values, for example locations, occupations, or clinical diagnoses. Codebooks were also used in 19th- and 20th-century commercial codes for
80-574: A codebook system was by Gabriele de Lavinde in 1379 working for the Antipope Clement VII . Two-part codebooks go back as least as far as Antoine Rossignol in the 1800s. From the 15th century until the middle of the 19th century, nomenclators (named after nomenclator ) were the most used cryptographic method. Codebooks with superencryption were the most used cryptographic method of World War I. The JN-25 code used in World War II used
100-492: A number of one kilobyte, I can tell you. In 1996, Sloot received an investment from colleague Jos van Rossum, a cigarette machine operator. The same year, Sloot and van Rossum were granted a 6-year Dutch patent for the Sloot Encoding System, naming Sloot as inventor and van Rossum as patent owner. The patent does not describe a compression scheme matching the claimed capabilities of the Sloot Encoding System. Despite
120-527: A randomly selected 20-minute cooking program on a single smartcard — is told in modest detail in Tom Perkins ' 2007 book Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins . On July 11, 1999, Sloot was found dead, in his garden at his home in Nieuwegein, of an apparent heart attack . He died one day before the deal was to be signed with Pieper. The family consented to an autopsy, but none was performed. Perkins,
140-486: A very low-quality video file normally requires several million bytes, and a 1080p movie requires about 3 gigabytes (3,221,225,472 bytes) per hour of playing time. As of 2022 , the plain text of the Dutch Misplaced Pages page describing the film Casablanca occupies 29,000 bytes. Roel Pieper , former CTO and board member of Philips , is quoted as saying (translated from Dutch): It is not about compression . Everyone
160-432: Is mistaken about that. The principle can be compared with a concept as Adobe-postscript , where sender and receiver know what kind of data recipes can be transferred, without the data itself actually being sent. Pieter Spronck rebuts Pieper's codebook analogy by pointing out that Sloot claimed his invention was capable of encoding any video, not only those videos composed from a particular finite set of "recipes". In
180-572: The Philips P2000 , Commodore 64 , IBM PC XT , and AT . Sloot developed the idea of a countrywide repair service network called RepaBase with a database containing details on all repairs carried out. This concept was the motivation to develop alternative data storage techniques that would require significantly less space than traditional methods. In 1995, Sloot claimed to have developed a data encoding technique that could store an entire feature film in only 8 kilobytes (8192 bytes). For comparison,
200-473: The SDCS. Think of it: by placing the right number in the SDCS, I can not only get Orson Welles' Citizen Kane — I can get Citizen Kane in colour! Or Citizen Kane backwards! Or Citizen Kane where the credits misspell the name of Everett Sloane [!...] Or Citizen Kane where Charles Foster Kane is replaced by Jar Jar Binks ! How many movies are possible that are variations on Citizen Kane ? More than fit in
220-511: The [Sloot Digital Coding System], it is claimed that no movies are stored, only basic building blocks of movies, such as colours and sounds. So, when a number is presented to the SDCS, it uses the number to fetch colours and sounds, and constructs a movie out of them. Any movie. No two different movies can have the same number, otherwise they would be the same movie. Every possible movie gets its own unique number. Therefore, I should be able to generate any possible movie by loading some unique number in
SECTION 10
#1732877002115240-600: The co-founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins , had agreed to invest in the technology when Sloot died. Perkins and Pieper would have proceeded after Sloot's death, but a key piece of the technology, a compiler stored on a floppy disk , had disappeared and, despite months of searching, was never recovered. After his death, a software engineer Sloot had worked with analysed Sloot's demonstrations. Despite Sloot's claim that his coding system stored all of its data on smart cards, his demonstration device
260-458: The code, he faked the demonstrations. This was an inventor who thought he had a breakthrough. And he was still working out some of the details. He didn’t get it quite working and so he resorted to deceit, playing video off of a hard drive, or streaming it wirelessly, but probably just playing it off of a hard drive. Sloot was born the youngest of three children. His father, a school headmaster, left his family quite soon after Sloot's birth. Sloot
280-442: The demonstrations to buy time to improve the code, but that the inherent mathematical limitations of the coding system would have inevitably proven impossible to overcome. I think Sloot thought his system could work, that he could find a way to store all possible movies in his RepaBase encoding system and look each up with a key, but he just hadn’t cracked it yet. And yet, in the meantime, to get people interested, while he worked out
300-431: The details, Yeah, he faked some demos. He said it’s not compression, this is a key to unlock the movie. But ... there are more possible movies than can be represented with a one kilobyte key. A one kilobyte key is like less than one bit per frame of a two hour movie. It’s like trying to give a unique name to a billion people using just a thousand names. No matter how you rearrange it, you can’t avoid some people getting
320-468: The impossibility of the encoding system, Sloot received further investment. In early 1999, Dutch investor Marcel Boekhoorn joined the group. In March 1999, the system was demonstrated to Pieper. Pieper resigned from Philips in May 1999 and joined Sloot's company as CEO, which was re-branded as The Fifth Force, Inc. The story — including an account of a demonstration in which Sloot apparently recorded and replayed
340-564: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sloot&oldid=1206680431 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Sloot Digital Coding System Software engineer Adam Gordon Bell postulates that Sloot may have believed in his idea because he failed to fully understand its mathematical limits, and thinking he simply needed to refine
360-402: The same name. Related Patents: Codebook A codebook is a type of document used for gathering and storing cryptography codes . Originally, codebooks were often literally books , but today "codebook" is a byword for the complete record of a series of codes, regardless of physical format. In cryptography , a codebook is a document used for implementing a code . A codebook contains
380-683: Was enrolled at a Dutch technical school, but dropped out early to work at a radio station. After fulfilling mandatory military service, Sloot settled in Utrecht with his wife. He worked briefly for Philips Electronics in Eindhoven . He left this job in 1978 after a year and a half, starting his next job in Groningen at an audio and video store. A few years later he moved to Nieuwegein where he started his own company repairing televisions and stereos. In 1984, Sloot began focusing on computer technology such as
400-428: Was found to contain a hard disk. Bell says that Sloot seems to have believed that he had created a novel encryption technology, but posthumous analysis suggests that he had actually created a variation of shared dictionary compression, a known data compression technique with predictable and finite mathematical limitations. Bell speculates that Sloot thought he could overcome these limitations with better coding, and faked
#114885