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First Hutter Prize Awarded
stefanb writes, "The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge, an ongoing challenge to compress a 100-MB excerpt of the Wikipedia, has been awarded for the first time. Alexander Ratushnyak managed to improve the compression factor to 5.86 and will receive a 3,416-Euro award. Being able to compress knowledge well is believed to be related to acting intelligently." The Usenet announcement notes that at Ratushnyak's request, part of the prize will go to Przemyslaw Skibinski of the University of Wroclaw Institute of Computer Science, for his early contributions to the PAQ compression algorithm.
"The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge, an ongoing challenge to compress a 100-MB excerpt of the Wikipedia"
Wikipedia? Knowledge? Isn't that already a lossy compression mechanism?
Hehe, and remember the study a few months back that found that the order of letters within a word is unimportant, so long as the first and last are correct? Potentially big words could be listed merely by how many of each letter they have, then randomly mix them up inside, order doesn't matter :)
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Am I the only one who finds it slightly ironic that (as of this writing), there is no entry for the Hutter Prize on Wikipedia?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Assuming a random distribution of digits in pi (and why does everyone assume this? -- there is certainly no proof), the odds are that you'll see one sequence of 4 zeros every 10,000 (decimal) digits. On the other hand, you'd expect to see 4 zeros once every 16 binary digits. Wikipedia, at 100MBs would be expected to be found once every 2^800,000,000 binary digits of pi.
Then again, maybe we're lucky, and this universe is God's way of storing the universal encyclopedia in the digits of pi. Wikipedia might be up near the front somewhere.