It was developed by Tsachy Weissman, a professor at Stanford University, and Vinith Misra, a graduate student, at the request of producers for HBO's television series Silicon Valley, a television show about a fictional tech start-up working on a data compression algorithm.
[1][2][3][4] It compares both required time and compression ratio of measured applications, with those of a de facto standard according to the data type.
The Weissman score has been used by Daniel Reiter Horn and Mehant Baid of Dropbox to explain real-world work on lossless compression.
"[5] This example shows the score for the data of the Hutter Prize,[6] using the paq8f as a standard and 1 as the scaling constant.
Although the value is relative to the standards against which it is compared, the unit used to measure the times changes the score (see examples 1 and 2).