It’s an interesting question, though. How far CAN you compress? At some point you’ve extracted every information contained and increased the density to a maximum amount - but what is that density?
I believe the general answer is, until the compressed file is indistinguishable from randomness. At that point there is no more redundant information left to compress. Like you said, the ‘information content’ of a message can be measured.
(Note that there are ways to get a file to look like randomness that don’t compress it)
It’s an interesting question, though. How far CAN you compress? At some point you’ve extracted every information contained and increased the density to a maximum amount - but what is that density?
This is a really good question!
I believe the general answer is, until the compressed file is indistinguishable from randomness. At that point there is no more redundant information left to compress. Like you said, the ‘information content’ of a message can be measured.
(Note that there are ways to get a file to look like randomness that don’t compress it)