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The Ansari family did indeed generously donate a great deal of money to the X Prize foundation, so much so that the prize name changed from the "X Prize" to the "Ansari X Prize." In no way would I want to take away from their generosity. However, it's unfair to the many other people who donated gobs of money, years before the Ansari family's donation, to make the Ansaris out to be the sole investors. (Look at the donor list, linked above, and you'll see that many others were donating serious wads of cash as well.) The X Prize foundation was founded in 1994, and had announced $5 million in prize money in 1998. The Ansari donation (and subsequent name change) occurred in 2004.

The Ansari family did indeed generously donate a great deal of money to the X Prize foundation, so much so that the prize name changed from the "X Prize" to the "Ansari X Prize." In no way would I want to take away from their generosity. However, it's unfair to the many other people who donated gobs of money, years before the Ansari family's donation, to make the Ansaris out to be the sole investors. (Look at the donor list, linked above, and you'll see that many others were donating serious wads of cash as well.) The X Prize foundation was founded in 1994, and had announced $5 million in prize money in 1998. The Ansari donation (and subsequent name change) occurred in 2004.

I got mine ready to go, just got to finish up duct-taping the capsule and finish drawing my logo.
Anyone else?
But seriously congratulations to Dr. Diamandis for winning! On to the moon!
http://www.xprizefoundation.com/news/LunarLanding. asp

Why is this article in the "science" category? We are talking about an engineering task, are we not?
And why does the /. article refer to a 3rd class space.com article? All information is available in the X Prize announcement.

In case anyone actually wants to comment.

The profound danger of a biased AI here is quite avoidable. The theoretic problem of unbiased AI has been formally solved by Marcus Hutter with AIXI:

Computational AI. There are strong arguments that AIXI is the most intelligent unbiased agent possible in the sense that AIXI behaves optimally in any computable environment.

This is the reason I set up the following definition of the C-Prize:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment on it:

Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize

Hutter's AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where "simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you currently know about the universe.

He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones. Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of these can have probability higher than p.

-- Matt Mahoney

Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states:

It is shown that optimal text compression is a harder problem thanartificial intelligence as defined by Turing's (1950) imitation game; thus compression ratio on a standard benchmark corpuscould be used as an objective and quantitative alternative test for AI (Mahoney, 1999).

(Mahoney is also a competitor who has some winnings from The Calgary Corpus Compression Challenge.)

Now a big question here is whether it might be possible to create a verifiably unbiased AI without making the compression program open source. In any case I don't think it is wise to trust any AI that hasn't at least gone through a compression competition with other purportedly unbiased AI's compressing an open source corpus.

Now, who might fund something like the C-Prize?

Well, here's a suggestion:

Since:

1. Larry Page is on the board of directors of the X-Prize Foundation.
2. The mission of the X-Prize Foundation:

The profound danger of a biased AI here is quite avoidable. The theoretic problem of unbiased AI has been formally solved by Marcus Hutter with AIXI:

Computational AI. There are strong arguments that AIXI is the most intelligent unbiased agent possible in the sense that AIXI behaves optimally in any computable environment.

This is the reason I set up the following definition of the C-Prize:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment on it:

Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize

Hutter's AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where "simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you currently know about the universe.

He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones. Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of these can have probability higher than p.

-- Matt Mahoney

Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states:

It is shown that optimal text compression is a harder problem thanartificial intelligence as defined by Turing's (1950) imitation game; thus compression ratio on a standard benchmark corpuscould be used as an objective and quantitative alternative test for AI (Mahoney, 1999).

(Mahoney is also a competitor who has some winnings from The Calgary Corpus Compression Challenge.)

Now a big question here is whether it might be possible to create a verifiably unbiased AI without making the compression program open source. In any case I don't think it is wise to trust any AI that hasn't at least gone through a compression competition with other purportedly unbiased AI's compressing an open source corpus.

Now, who might fund something like the C-Prize?

Well, here's a suggestion:

Since:

1. Larry Page is on the board of directors of the X-Prize Foundation.
2. The mission of the X-Prize Foundation:

These tasks are probably much more complex than the Ansari X prize... which rewarded 40 times this much. Offering $250K is insane. Stupid. Insanely Stupid.

might I remind people of the recent success of the private funded experiments? http://www.xprizefoundation.com/about_us/default.a sp

They were able to do in a short time what has taken the Gov'ts of the world well over 40 years to do.

Not that the government is all bad, its just once beaurocrats and sue happy people are done we have a highly ineffecient machine for innovation.

Like this, you mean?
http://www.xprizefoundation.com/

Must not be keeping up with the news or something.

Seriously, this is basically how all successful exploration has proceeded in the past.

If the project is viable, there's always the possibility of other funding from private sources such as the Planetary Society. Interest in spaceflight and the search for extraterrestrial life comes from many corners, and as evidenced by the X Prize, there's money out there.

I don't know if this Blue Origin is related to the X Prize winner, but this space flight stuff is very real and very doable. I watched this whole flight, and it's pretty exciting that low-cost, safe space flight is a real possibility. Check out the photos or webcasts here: X Prize