Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold

Baldrson writes "Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program), thereby not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance (between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character) estimated by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text prediction gambling. When the Hutter Prize started, less than a year ago, the best performance was 1.466 bits per character. Alexander Ratushnyak's open-sourced GPL program is called paq8hp12 [rar file]."

Comments

It's called WHAT?

[martinX]

Alexander Ratushnyak's open-sourced GPL program is called paq8hp12.

With names like this, it's no wonder OSS isn't well known. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue... Hang on, is it l33t sp33k?

Re:It's called WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

no wonder OSS isn't well known

Don't you people ever shut the fuck up? Is that *really* such an interesting topic to you? And what about the text compressor? Got anything to say about that? No? Fuck off then.