Compress Wikipedia and Win AI Prize

Baldrson writes "If you think you can compress a 100M sample of Wikipedia better than paq8f, then you might want to try winning win some of a (at present) 50,000 Euro purse. Marcus Hutter has announced the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge the intent of which is to incentivize the advancement of AI through the exploitation of Hutter's theory of optimal universal artificial intelligence. The basic theory, for which Hutter provides a proof, is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program. Think of it as Ockham's Razor on steroids. Matt Mahoney provides a writeup of the rationale for the prize including a description of the equivalence of compression and general intelligence."

Comments

Re:Er, I'm not so sure about this.

[Baldrson]

Wikipedia is a representation of accumulated human knowledge (experience) presented primarily in natural language. The smallest self-extracting archive will necessarily have rules that imply that knowledge and in such a way that the rules of natural language are represented as well.

The distinction between compressed experience and rules is an illusion. Rules _are_ compressed experience in the same sense that "x+y=z" is a compressed representation of the table of all ordered pairs (x,y) of numbers and their sum (z). If one has 2**32 distinct rows in such a table then one can physically represent it in a very small program. Even if one has only a small sample of the rows, one may still quite profitably compress those rows with the program.

Re:But captain

[WilliamSChips]

I thought the first rule of Star Trek was that the redshirts always die.