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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.

2 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. 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.