This scheme wouldn't work. For example, suppose you wanted to protect a large number of initial digits of pi. According to current knowledge, pi isn't compressible by any standard compressor, so its bits will be represented just by themselves. Any ECC appled to the "compressed" bitstring will still have the problem that the high-order bits are treated the same as the low order bits (reason: the Hamming weight decoding assumption doesn't distinguish bit positions -- all are equally important). At 02:33 AM 1/26/2019, Dave Dyer wrote:
Assuming I had a large number of integers to protect, my thought would be to feed them through a good compressor, maybe LZW, and then apply ECC to the resulting high entropy strings. The initial representation of the integers wouldn't matter much.