I imagine there could be two different compression strategies that both happen to produce a result of the same length, but cannot be merged.
I think this is correct, but I think of this as being similar to chirality—multiple symmetric versions of the same essential information. I think it also probably depends on the description language you use, so maybe in one language something might have multiple versions, but in another it wouldn’t?
Yes, if there is no deep underlying reason why the two minimal descriptions should be same, and it “just happened”, I would assume that with slightly different description language it would not happen.
Even the “3A2B” vs “3ABB” example would stop working if encoding a number used a different number of bits than encoding a character.
I think this is correct, but I think of this as being similar to chirality—multiple symmetric versions of the same essential information. I think it also probably depends on the description language you use, so maybe in one language something might have multiple versions, but in another it wouldn’t?
Yes, if there is no deep underlying reason why the two minimal descriptions should be same, and it “just happened”, I would assume that with slightly different description language it would not happen.
Even the “3A2B” vs “3ABB” example would stop working if encoding a number used a different number of bits than encoding a character.