TY - JOUR T1 - Phylogeny of the COVID-19 Virus SARS-CoV-2 by Compression JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2020.07.22.216242 SP - 2020.07.22.216242 AU - Rudi L. Cilibrasi AU - Paul M.B. Vitányi Y1 - 2020/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/23/2020.07.22.216242.abstract N2 - We analyze the phylogeny and taxonomy of the SARS-CoV-2 virus using compression. This is a new alignment-free method called the “normalized compression distance” (NCD) method. It discovers all effective similarities based on Kolmogorov complexity. The latter being incomputable we approximate it by a good compressor such as the modern zpaq. The results comprise that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is closest to the RaTG13 virus and similar to two bat SARS-like coronaviruses bat-SL-CoVZXC21 and bat-SL-CoVZC4. The similarity is quantified and compared with the same quantified similarities among the mtDNA of certain species. We treat the question whether Pangolins are involved in the SARS-CoV-2 virus.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -