175230721
submission
Baldrson writes:
Kaido Orav and Byron Knoll just beat the Nuclear Code Golf Course Record!
What's Nuclear Code Golf?
Some of you may have heard that "next token prediction" is the basis of large language models generalizing. Well there is just one contest that pays cash prizes in proportion to how much you beat the best prior benchmark for the most rigorous measure of next token prediction: Lossless compression length including decompressor length. The catch is, in order to make it relevant regardless of The Hardware Lottery's hysterics*, you are restricted to a single general purpose CPU. This contest is not for the faint of heart. Think of it as Nuclear Code Golf.
Kaido Orav and Byron Knoll are the team to beat now.
*The global economy is starting to look like a GPU-maximizer AGI.
172991548
submission
Baldrson writes:
Kaido Orav has just improved 1.38% on the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge with his “fx-cmix” entry.
The competition seems to be heating up, with this winner coming a mere 6 months since the prior winner. This is all the more impressive since each improvement in the benchmark approaches the (unknown) minimum size called the Kolmogorov Complexity of the data.
171454380
submission
Baldrson writes:
Marcus Hutters tweet makes it official:Before describing Saurabhs contribution, there are two salient facts required to understand the importance of this competition:
1) It is more important than a language modeling competition. It is knowledge comprehension. To quote Gregory Chaitin, "Compression is comprehension."
- Every programming language is described in Wikipedia.
- Every scientific concept is described in Wikipedia.
- Every mathematical concept is described in Wikipedia.
- Every historic event is described in Wikipedia.
- Every technology is described in Wikipedia.
- Every work of art is described in Wikipedia — with examples.
- There is even the Wikidata project that provides Wikipedia a substantial amount of digested statistics about the real world.
Are you going to argue that comprehension of all that knowledge is insufficient to generatively speak the truth consistent with all that knowledge — and that this notion of "truth" will not be at least comparable to that generatively spoken by large language models such as ChatGPT?
2) The above also applies to Matt Mahoneys Large Text Compression Benchmark, which, unlike the Hutter Prize, allows unlimited computer resources. However the Hutter Prize is geared toward research in that it restricts computation resources to the most general purpose hardware that is widely available.
As described by the seminal paper "The Hardware Lottery" by Sara Hooker, AI research is biased toward algorithms optimized for existing hardware infrastructure. While this hardware bias is justified for engineering (applying existing scientific understanding to the "utility function" of making money) to quote Sara Hooker, it "can delay research progress by casting successful ideas as failures".
Saurabh Kumars Contribution
The complaint that this is "mere" optimization ignores the fact that this was done on general purpose computation hardware, and is therefore in line with the spirit of Sara Hookers admonition to researchers in "The Hardware Lottery". By showing how to optimize within the constraint of general purpose computation, Saurabhs contribution may help point the way toward future directions in hardware architecture.
149055575
submission
Baldrson writes:
The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge has now awarded €9000 to Artemiy Margaritov as the first winner of the 10x expansion of the HKCP, first announced, over a year ago in conjunction with a Lex Fridman podcast!
Artemiy Margaritov's STARLIT algorithm's 1.13% cleared the 1% improvement hurdle to beat the last benchmark, set by Alexander Rhatushnyak. He receives a bonus in proportion to the time since the last benchmark was set, raising his award by 60% to €9000.
Congratulations to Artemiy Margaritov for his winning submission!
125621194
submission
Baldrson writes:
First announced on Slashdot in 2006, AI professor Marcus Hutter has gone big with his challenge to the artificial intelligence community. A 500,000€ purse now backs The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. Contestants compete to compress Wikipedia to its essence. The 1 billion character excerpt of Wikipedia called "enwik9" is approximately the amount that a human can read in a lifetime.
Hutter's challenge is an advance over the Turing Test. Devised by the famous AI theorist, Alan Turing, a chat bot must be able to fool a human. It is pass-fail. Hutter's prize incrementally awards distillation of Wikipedia's storehouse of human knowledge to its essence. This judging criterion derives from a mathematical theory of natural science, informally known as "Occam's Razor". Formally it is called Algorithmic Information Theory or AIT. AIT is, according to Hutter's "AIXI" theory, essential to Universal Intelligence.
Hutter's judging criterion is superior to Turing's in 3 ways:
1) It is objective,
2) It rewards incremental improvements,
3) It is founded on a mathematical theory of natural science.
Detailed rules for the contest and answers to frequently asked questions are available.
68465859
submission
Baldrson writes:
Kitco.com reports that: "Low energy nuclear reactor (LENR) technology, and by extension palladium, is attracting the attention of one of the richest men in the world and a pioneer inventor of new technology... In a recent visit to Italy, billionaire business man, investor and inventor Bill Gates said that for several years he has been a believer in the idea of LENR, and is a sponsor of companies developing the technology... During his trip to Italy he visited the national agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable economic development (ENEA) where scientists have made significant progress towards a working design for low energy nuclear fusion. The centerpiece of their design is the same as in Mitsubishi’s: palladium. Creating palladium foil with just the right parameters, and managing stress levels in the material was a key issue, one that the researchers at EMEA were able to resolve several years ago." This is controversial to say the least. For example one of the first (1994) Idea Futures claims was that a palladium cold fusion device could produce even a small fraction of that claimed by many researchers over the last quarter century. That claim is presently selling at 2% odds and the judgement deadline is next week.
