Identical Compression
Both Alice and Bob are told to write an essay on "Compression" and send the zipped file of their essay to the teacher. It is known that they use the same compression algorithm to zip their file.
When the teacher receives the file, she noticed that the data of both zipped file is exactly the same, hence she claims that the two essays are identical.
Is she correct?
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1 solution
The teacher is correct.
It is given that they use the same compression algorithm. Hence they must be using the same algorithm to decompress the file. Since the algorithm must be non-probabilistic, every input the algorithm takes in should always produce the same output. This can lead us to the conclusion that after the decompression, the teacher will find two identical essays.