Photographic Compression

Description
A pretty pricey way of getting those dick pics space-borne, but hey, someone's got to keep the pilot's morale up right?



Cost
- One MAJOR ALGORITHM research

Impact
For a cost of $1m, your agency can send a picture to the shuttle instead of text

Remarkable properties of the compression algorithm mean that the picture will be delivered very clearly as long as it is ONLY a picture, but may be significantly distorted if a picture of text is taken (almost as if the algorithm knows that people might try and bend the rules!)

Future Research
The interesting properties of photographic compression raise a couple of interesting future avenues of research. You could use your ability to alter the information your agency is transmitting to investigate Signature Spoofing, or use your superior knowledge of compression to intercept and decode the shuttle transmissions before anyone else, leading to Active Message Cloaking