Bioinformatics Podcast Summaries

Zip It! - Finding File Similarity Using Compression Utilities - Computerphile

Computerphile

Jul 15, 2025

By leveraging the way compression algorithms identify repeated patterns, you can quantify similarity between any two datasets. This creates an incredibly simple, agnostic metric for clustering everything from genomic data to linguistic families without needing domain-specific analysis.

Key insight: You can generate a scientifically valid phylogenetic tree of species or language families simply by compressing concatenated text files and measuring the resulting file size.