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.