[X] My Assistant

[IngeniousHax]

Recently I have been playing a lot of word games on the iTouch, and I seem to have a few questions...

Now a dictionary database holding all possible words can run >20Gb's (probably more). But how does the iTouch hold all the possible word values with-out taking up much space at all? Infact significantly <1Gb.

Many of the words are over 5 letters and I can't seem to wrap m head around this. Does it have to do with the fact that there are usually only 5x4 squares on the screen? Or how is it done, because I know in C++ it's a fairly large sized memory program... Any ideas?

[markhazlett9]

compression an a very efficient database access utility lol.. thats how they do it

[IngeniousHax]

Oh, that sounds legit. But damn, that is one hell of a compression ratio... like 4000:1

[born2c0de]

Yeah, but in such scenarios, it's expected from a [url=http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Data_Compression/Dictionary_compressiondictionary based compression algorithm[/url].
A dictionary database is placed on the device natively (it's space can be loosely approximated as expected_device_storage - actual_available_disk_space - device_firmware_size - device_other_resources)
Since the dictionary is already present on a device, the algorithm simply stores pointers to the dictionary file hence decreasing the file size substantially.