So I don't know if anyone's mentioned this yet, but it might be interesting / worthwhile to point out that the goal of the contest is to compress the 100 MB of wikipedia knowledge into a self-extracting program as efficiently as possible is nearly equivalent to asking "what's the Kolmogorov Complexity of this data? There is a definite (unknown) lower bound on the size of the program that will describe the knowledge, which is the size of the compressed data + the size of the decompressing program. This is a non-trivial problem -- especially with the added constraints of limited memory and time -- that could yield surprising and insightful results.
Slashdot Mirror
So I don't know if anyone's mentioned this yet, but it might be interesting / worthwhile to point out that the goal of the contest is to compress the 100 MB of wikipedia knowledge into a self-extracting program as efficiently as possible is nearly equivalent to asking "what's the Kolmogorov Complexity of this data? There is a definite (unknown) lower bound on the size of the program that will describe the knowledge, which is the size of the compressed data + the size of the decompressing program. This is a non-trivial problem -- especially with the added constraints of limited memory and time -- that could yield surprising and insightful results.