Re: classification

[http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)]

 > Hi, Robert -- need an advice. I talked to a company about a prosect of
 > wroking on their image processing functionality. Seems like I made an
 > expression of more a "classification" rather than an "imaging" guy.
 > Now here's the rub, they quite unexpectedly sent me a long file with
 > numbers asking to classify it. I'm going to look at it and "try
 > things". What would be first things you'd try? Any handy SW?

Numbers.  No, I don't know of any software which will classify sets of
numbers explicitly.  Finding patterns in an arbitrary sequence of numbers
is actually a very difficult problem.  (If it weren't, breaking encrypted
sequences wouldn't be so challenging.)  Certain assumptions are usually
made about the nature of pieces of data.  For example, when Andrew
Tridgell reverse-engineered the SMB file sharing protocol (which was to
become Samba), he assumed that a human being created the structure of the
protocol and that there are certain limits to the size of each "bag of
bits".