A pretty neat and simple method is one outlined by Zaxo in Re: similar texts !?. Basically, you measure how much it helps a compression algorithm to concatenate the two files together, compared to when you compress them independently.

If you think of a compression algorithm as a mild approximation to Shannon entropy, then this approach is essentially computing the corresponding approximation of mutual information (normalized to the range 0.5 - 1), which is the intuitive concept you seem to be looking for.

blokhead

In reply to Re: Module for Approximate File Comparison by blokhead
in thread Module for Approximate File Comparison by neversaint

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