DYNAMIC ADAPTIVE COMPRESSION TOOL
                                 DACT 0.8.37

Release information:
  pkg:  DACT version 0.8.37
  url:  http://www.rkeene.org/files/oss/dact/dact-0.8.37.tar.gz
  web:  http://www.rkeene.org/oss/dact/
  date: Sun Apr  4 01:01:44 CST 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

	A Brief Discussion of the History and Operation of
	the DACT Compression engine.


History:
	DACT started out as a science fair project on "Lossless
Compression of Arbitrary Data."  A feat which (to me) seemed like it
should be possible, but I later realized why it could not be[1].  From
there, I decided that a compression program that knew different file
types and had a dictionary of compression algorithms to use for each file
type.  So I began writing a program to do this, but I was too lazy to do
some magic identification, or base it on the file's extension.  So, this
program instead compressed each block with all known algorithms, finding
the smallest overall file size.  The next logical step was to make it test
each algorithm on each block.

Operation:
	DACT takes a block (of arbitrary size, specified by the user) from
a file, compresses it with all of the compression algorithms in it's
dictionary, finding the one that yields the lowest size. It provides a
simple interface for creating new algorithms.

Questions?  Comments?  Code/Document Contribution?  Feel free to contact
me at rkeene@rkeene.org.