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First Hutter Prize Awarded

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the compress-this dept.

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.

7 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Seems like a strange contest by Barny · · Score: 2, Informative

    20% of a few petabytes is.... a lot :)

    And yes, offering cash in this way is a great incentive for programers.

    Also, if its a cpu friendly (read: reasonable cpu useage or even able to be offloaded on a processing card) method it could potentially add 20% onto your bandwidth :)

    --
    ...
    /me sighs
  2. For comparison .... by Ignorant+Aardvark · · Score: 3, Informative

    For comparison purposes, WinRAR on its best setting only gets this down to 24MB. Doubtless 7zip could get even lower, but I don't think either could crack the 17MB mark. And certainly neither of those would be self-extracting, which this contest requires.

    --
    Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
  3. Re:what the hell? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    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?

    Remember the study a few years back that proved this to be false, pointing out that slpmiy rnisreveg the ioiretnr lrettes mdae it sltnacifingiy mroe dluciffit to raed the wdros?

    Now let us never speak of this again.
  4. Re:Hmm... by CastrTroy · · Score: 2, Informative

    While this is not article on the Hutter Prize itself, you will be relieved to know that it is mentioned in the article on Marcus Hutter

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  5. Re:Seems like a strange contest by CryoPenguin · · Score: 2, Informative

    Since the criteria for entry say that any new submission must beat the current record, it's no surprise that only 3 people are listed. You're not seeing any of the people who didn't win.

  6. Re:makes one wonder by AxelBoldt · · Score: 2, Informative
    I'm sure you could find some pretty small program that would compute pi to some very large number of digits, and find the wikipedia excerpt in the results, but It would take a very long time to run.
    In all likelihood, that trick won't work: your program would need to know the start index of the Wikipedia text in the digit sequence of pi, and that index would be so astronomically huge that writing it down would be about as long as writing down Wikipedia itself. As a little example of the effect, think about finding the first occurrence of '0000' in the digit sequence of pi, and ask yourself how far out that is likely to happen.
  7. Re:Seems like a strange contest by vidarh · · Score: 3, Informative

    You miss the point. The goal isn't to achieve better usable compression, but to encourage research they believe will lead to advances in AI.