Hutter Prize won for a Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold

Alexander Ratushnyak won the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge by compressing the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to only 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program). The Hutter Prize gives 50,000€  for compressing Human Knowledge.

 

Alexander brought text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 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 and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text prediction gambling.

When the Hutter Prize started, less than a year ago, the best performance was 1,466 bits per character.

Alexander Ratushnyak's open-sourced GPL program is called paq8hp12 [rar file].