LZW is the algorithm used in compress and also in GIF. It is a beautifully elegant and simple algorithm (based on learning a dictionary of words, and encoding the source as their indices) that converges in the limit on the Shannon entropy of the source.

In 2013, I was studying bioinformatics and had an idea to apply something like sequence alignment and edit scripts to compression instead of just, as LZW, addition at the end of the string. So, the idea for LZW-X was born long ago, but it wasn't until recently, by the power of AI, that I could implement and test it properly.

This is that proper implementation and it reveals what I intuited: that there are gains to be had using a method like this. I consider this a first rung, a starting point for further exploration.

Check it out: https://github.com/BrowserBox/LZW-X