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.

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).

Re:makes one wonder

[Alaria Phrozen]

If you'd RTFA you'd find the running times ranged from 30 minutes to 5 hours. They have a whole table and everything.

The whole point of the challenge was to create a self-executing compression program that made a perfect copy of their 100MB file. Final file sizes were in the 16MB range. Geeze, seriously RTFA.

compress knowledge = intelligence

[Profound]

Being able to compress knowledge well is believed to be related to acting intelligently. - IHNPTTT (I Have Not Passed The Turing Test), but while my brain is good at remember the gist of knowlege, but really bad at losslessly recalling it.

Re:Seems like a strange contest

[Anonymous Coward]

There aren't many Wikipedia related things I don't know about (I'm a Wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and bureacrat, featured article director, and I'm on the Wikimedia Foundation's Press Committee), and this is the first time I've ever heard of this contest.

Cut the rank pulling. Almost half a million people have a lower slashdot ID than you, thousands of them with much more important functions than you, but they don't see a need to brag about their positions every time they've given half a chance.

I think it's fair to say it's been relatively low-profile.

Unlike you, you mean?

Re:Seems like a strange contest

[rbarreira]

There aren't many women related things I don't know about (I have a girlfriend, I've had sex, my mother and my sisters are all women), and this is the first time I've ever heard of the "women's olympic weighlifting" contest. I think it's fair to say it's been relatively low-profile.