Alexander Ratushnyak Wins First Hutter Prize Payout

330 views
Skip to first unread message

James Bowery

unread,
Oct 27, 2006, 7:31:21 PM10/27/06
to hutter...@googlegroups.com
Alexander Ratushnyak (middle) of the Moscow State University Compression Project is the first winner of The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge. On 25 Sep 2006, just two months after the announcement of the Hutter Prize, Alexander Ratushnyak submitted his program paq8hp5 which compressed the first 100MB of Wikipedia down to 17,073,018 bytes. As required by the contest, this size includes a program which must be capable of decompressing the 100MB sample of Wikipedia within a reasonable time using widely-available desktop computer hardware resources. This is a whopping 6.8% improvement over the contest baseline and compares very favorably with the historic rate of progress in text compression of approximately 3% per year, even accounting for "low-hanging-fruit" under customization of compressors for new benchmark corpora.

paq8hp5 is the first text compressor to reduce to practice the theoretic possibility of using semantic associations between words -- a form of language modeling.

At Alexander Ratushnyak's request, part of the 3416€ (500€ for each percent improvement) prize will go to Przemyslaw Skibinski of the University of Wroclaw Institute of Computer Science for his early contributions to the underlying PAQ compression algorithm.

Marcus Hutter, chairman, and the entire Hutter Prize Committee congratulate Alexander Ratushnyak and Przemyslaw Skibinski for advancing the state of the art in compression of human knowledge and bringing the potential of artificial intelligence closer to realization.

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages