Hutter Prize

Basic idea

A €500,000 prize for losslessly compressing a 1 GB snapshot of English Wikipedia. The premise: better compression = better world-model = better AI. Compression and prediction are formally equivalent.

Key facts

• Optimal compression length $\approx$ Shannon entropy of source: $L \ge H(X)$.
• Compressor that predicts $P(x_{n+1}|x_{1..n})$ well achieves codelength $-\log_2 P$ via arithmetic coding.
• Prize threshold: beat the previous record by $\ge 1\%$.

Hutter prize essentially states that AI and compression are the same problem

Resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize

Siblings

• aixi