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I would also add to this the Methuselah Mouse Prize-which is a prize for making a mouse live the longest. What is especially interesting about the MM prize is that it is a continuous prize that will constantly have a higher bar-and will never expire.

A simple prize criterion would be for the first program producing a major natural language text corpus, with the size of the program being less than 1.3 bits per character of the produced corpus. Smaller intermediate prizes would help spur broader interest.

It may be better to pattern such a prize after the Methuselah mouse prize, where beating the old record would net you a portion of the prize proportional to how much the old record was beaten by. The size of the prize pot grows as donators add more money to it, and shrinks whenever a new text compression record is broken.

If you are interested about mouse longevity, then you should check out the Methuselah Mouse Prize. The purpose of this contest is to promote longevity research and life extension, by using a mouse as an example. Here is some information on how the prize is distributed to winners (the contest is indefinite, it will never run out of money).

If you are interested about mouse longevity, then you should check out the Methuselah Mouse Prize. The purpose of this contest is to promote longevity research and life extension, by using a mouse as an example. Here is some information on how the prize is distributed to winners (the contest is indefinite, it will never run out of money).

We have the richest man in the USA who can't really talk about anything except maintaining the intellectual property rules that made him rich. There are a lot of alternative ways to fund innovation-prizes like the Methuselah Mouse and Xprize come to mind. Gates has the money to be a serious force changing the human condition-but I see little evidence that he's really serious about acting in that direction.

In the Fortune article, David Stipp points out that 30 years ago people would have called you mad to predict goats that made spider silk. All the signs are that science can make serious inroads into extending the healthy human life span within 30 years from now - regenerative medicine, cancer therapies, nanomedicine, manipulating mitchondria.

Read my last two newsletters for examples of recent scientific advances that clearly point to ways forward to achieve this goal. It isn't unrealistic. It isn't pie in the sky science. It's just hard work, funding, and time. The time could be short enough for us to choose to live a much longer, healthier life - but it's up to us to make that happen. Hence the Methuselah Mouse prize and similar initiatives. If you value life and want more of it, you should certainly donate.

From Longevity Meme: As the founders of the Methuselah Mouse prize realized, healthy life extension in mice is a yardstick by which the public measures possibilities for the future of human health and longevity. Long-lived mice will mean that long-lived people are not too far off. Aubrey de Grey thinks that we could largely defeat aging in mice in a decade, given the right level of funding - certainly food for thought.

http://www.methuselahmouse.org

I think that progress to date since the launch last year is pretty impressive. $50,000 raised and $300,000 in pledges is far greater progress than the X Prize managed in the same period of time after launch - learning from the past and improving on it is a good thing. Check out The Three Hundred as well as a good example of how to get a certain set of people involved:

http://www.methuselahfoundation.org/threehundred.a sp

Why are prizes for research so good? Take a look at this piece on how they work and why they work so well:

http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/research_prize s.cfm