Gratitude Day 9: Run-Length Encoding / PackBits

I'm taking this little detour within my gratitude series because I want to explore some of the very basic algorithms that are an essential part of our daily lives, for which we have little awareness, and to which is given little thought or thanks. Data Compression has always been a fascination of mine since I was a teenager. You feed some data into a program, wait some minutes, and get a representation of that data that might be half the size of the original. HOW?!? (Of course, nowadays, it's more like feed a ton of data into a program, wait a couple seconds, and get output that might be a tenth of the size of the original!) I don't know many details about the actual history of data compression, as it's a very old and in-depth subject that actually crosses several disciplines, but I do know that one of the most basic and earliest forms is Run-Length Encoding. The basic idea of run-length encoding is to encode the "runs" (repeats) of a symbol, rather than encoding each repeated symbol…