Sloot Digital Coding System

The Sloot Digital Coding System (SDCS) is an alleged technique for data encoding claimed to have been invented in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (1945–1999), an electronics engineer in the Netherlands. Sloot claimed his system could represent an entire feature film with only eight kilobytes of data, a level of compression which is mathematically impossible according to Shannon's source coding theorem.

Sloot demonstrated the technology by recording and playing back video, apparently using a small smart card which stored a unique identifier by which any possible video could be referenced. He convinced entrepreneurs Roel Pieper, Marcel Boekhoorn, and Tom Perkins to invest in the technology. However, several days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died of a sudden heart attack, and his source code was lost forever. His claims have never been reproduced or verified. Contrary to his claims, the playback device he used was discovered to contain a hard drive.

Software engineer Adam Gordon Bell speculated that Sloot had come upon a variation of shared dictionary compression, a known technique. He speculates that Sloot believed in his idea because he failed to understand its mathematical limitations, and faked the demonstrations in order to buy time while refining the details. Provided by Wikipedia