A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, just counting. Fortuitously, I came across the paper Language Modeling is Compression, which mentioned the compression–prediction equivalence:every prediction model is inherently a compressor, and all compression algorithms are prediction models.This led to the natural question: can gzip do language modeling?1 No neural network, no learned p...