PS: Many people disagree with the posited definition of "artificial
intelligence quality", but it seems obvious to me.  I'm not sure why
its not obvious to everyone but such is the case.  Any suggestions on
how to get this across more effectively?  Or are we dealing with
different cognitive types -- some will simply 'get it' and others
won't?

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/cprize.html

The C-Prize

The most crucial technology prize of all.
By Jim Bowery
Copyright May 2005
The author grants the right to copy and distribute without
modification.

Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial
problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be
one that solves the rest of them:

The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.

The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the
major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation

A very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question
of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.

Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of
artificial intelligence:

Kolmogorov Complexity

Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of
Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or
over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a
given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program
required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.

Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial
intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial
Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:

Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world
wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give
the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest
representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no
outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an
AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the
size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed
writings.

In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on
the AIQ test.

The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression
requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going
to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a
superset of their mental faculties.

Mechanics

The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize
where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like
to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award
similar to the M-Prize let me know by email. 1