Abstract: System and method using a competitive process to create an optimized set of variable length bit codes to encode one, two or three dimensional data and a high speed redundant lookup table for decoding the resulting representation in real time. The encoding phase consists of multiple passes through the unencoded data to determine the overall best code set for the given data. The primitives used to encode the data may be any mix of operations that captures the redundancy of the raw data. For graphic applications, specific colors and patterns copied from previously occurring data yield sufficiently high compression ratios, but any likely candidates for high frequency occurrence may be added to the mix. The encoding algorithm will ignore any non-optimal operations and assign them no space in the code set.