The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge
Researchers in artificial intelligence are being put to the test by a
new competition: The Hutter Prize.
The Hutter Prize challenges researchers to achieve ever shorter
descriptions of the first 100MB of Wikipedia, the collaborative online
encyclopedia. These descriptions are required to be executable on
widely available personal computers, and to exactly reproduce that
sample of Wikipedia within practical computation resources.
The purpose of this competition is to advance the field of artificial
intelligence through the compression of human knowledge, represented
by a substantial part of Wikipedia. The better one can compress
natural language, the better one understands it, the better on can
predict; and being able to predict well is key for being able to act
intelligently.
The principle that less is more was first proposed by William of
Ockham in the 13th century, formalized as universal inductive
inference by Ray Solomonoff, as shortest codes by Andrey Kolmogorov
and Gregory Chaitin, and as minimal descriptions by Chris Wallace and
Jorma Rissanen during the 1960s and 70s. In the 2000s, Marcus Hutter
unified this development with decision theory to prove that an
artificial agent's optimal action is to maximize its total reward
based on the shortest model consistent with its past observations.
Finding this model is incomputable, but, improving upon Levin search,
he also devised an asymptotically fastest algorithm for this and a
large class of other problems.
The Hutter Prize fund currently stands at 50,000 euro and is awarded
in increments with improvements in compression ratio of the Wikipedia
sample.
This incentive works. In the first month of the Hutter Prize,
contestants improved on the previous best text compression program by
nearly 6%.
It recently appeared at Slashdot and other websites and received a lot
of attention.
For details of the Hutter Prize see:
http://prize.hutter1.net
For discussion of the Hutter Prize see:
http://groups.google.com/group/Hutter-Prize
-- James Bowery
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