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.