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.

Comments

Re:Seems like a strange contest

[Salvance]

20% is a lot, when the compression/decompression is fast. gzip/WinRAR/WinZip all compress this file to the 22-24MB mark in a minute or two on my desktop (which is comparable to their test machine). The winner's algorithm compressed the data to 16.9MB, but spent 5 hours and 900MB of RAM doing so. The contest would be far more interesting if it added a reasonable time/RAM restriction (e.g. 10 minutes and 500MB of RAM).