Compression is Intelligence

Imagine you want to convey a pattern-filled image to a friend:
• Inefficient approach (Uncompressed): You tell him the color coordinates of every pixel. This requires a huge amount of data, and you actually don’t even know what the picture depicts.
• Efficient approach (Compressed): You tell him, “This is a matrix composed of 100 blue circles evenly spaced.”
To describe all the pixels with a single sentence (smaller size), you must discover the pattern within (circles, equal spacing, blue). This process of discovering patterns is “intelligence.”