Alexander Ratushnyak Wins Second Hutter Prize Payout
James A. Bowery
second winner of The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human
Knowledge <http://prize.hutter1.net/>. The Hutter Prize was
established and initially underwritten by Marcus Hutter <http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Hutter> based on the equivalence between
artificial intelligence and compression <http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/
ai/uaibook.htm>.
On 14 May '07 Alexander Ratushnyak submitted a 16,481,655 byte self-
extracting archive of the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia. This
beat the prior Hutter Prize award, also won by Alexander Ratushnyak,
by 3.5% which, at 500€ per 1%, yields a prize of 1732€. The winning
program is open sourced under the GPL and is called paq8hp12 <http://
www.binet.com.ua/~artest/HKCC/paq8hp12any.rar>.
With paq8hp12 at 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner
of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance
(between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character) estimated by the founder of
information theory, Claude Shannon <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Claude_Shannon> and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text
prediction gambling <http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/dissertation/
entropy1.html>. Given that, when the Hutter Prize started, the best
performance was 1.466 bits per character, the Hutter Prize looks like
it is on track to deliver on its promise of practical AI technology
via human knowledge compression. Donations to increase the incentive
of the Hutter Prize are welcome. Email marcus...@gmx.net for
details.
Most of Aexander Ratushnyak's time developing paqhp6-12 went into
planning and performing experiments, and studying and understanding
the results of these experiments.
Alexander Ratushnyak's current occupation is in software engineering.
For him data compression is science, art and sport all together. This
was his motivation for participating in the contest.
Short C.V: Dr. Ratushnyak was born in the Siberian Scientific Center
<http://www.nsc.ru>, studied data compression and related algorithms
since 1991, and graduated from the Moscow State University
(www.msu.ru) in 1996, and is a major contributor to the Moscow State
University Compression Project <http://www.compression.ru/about/
index_en.html>. After his PhD in 2002 he lived and worked in various
places in the world.
Marcus Hutter, chairman, and the entire Hutter Prize Committee
congratulate Alexander Ratushnyak for advancing the state of the art
in compression of human knowledge and bringing the potential of
artificial intelligence closer to realization.
Matt Mahoney
posted to http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/text.html#1323
I also posted a "lite" version of paq, lpaq1, that might be useful for
others entering the contest. I wanted an open source context mixing
compressor that's small and fast enough to build on. It is 35 times
faster than paq8l but files are about 10% bigger.
-- Matt Mahoney