Hutter Prize

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The

Hutter Prize

is a cash prize funded by

which rewards

improvements on a specific 1

English text file, with the goal of encouraging research in

(AI).

Launched in 2006, the prize awards 5,000 euros for each one percent improvement (with 500,000 euros total funding)

in the compressed size of the file

enwik9

, which is the larger of two files used in the

Large Text Compression

Benchmark

(LTCB);

enwik9 consists of the first 10

bytes of a specific version of

The

ongoing

competition is organized by Hutter, Matt Mahoney, and Jim Bowery.

The prize was announced on August 6, 2006

with a smaller text file:

enwik8

consisting of 100MB. On February 21, 2020

both the dataset and the total prize pool were expanded by a factor of 10: from

enwik8

of 100MB to

enwik9

of 1GB; from

50,000 to 500,000 euros.

Goals

[

]

The goal of the Hutter Prize is to encourage research in

(AI). The organizers believe that text

compression and AI are equivalent problems. Hutter proved that the optimal behavior of a goal-seeking agent in an

unknown but computable environment is to guess at each step that the environment is probably controlled by one of the

shortest programs consistent with all interaction so far.

However, there is no general solution because

is not computable. Hutter proved that in the restricted case (called

) where the environment is

restricted to time

and space

, a solution can be computed in time

(t2

), which is still intractable.

The organizers further believe that compressing natural language text is a

problem, equivalent to passing the

. Thus, progress toward one goal represents progress toward the other. They argue that

requires vast real-world knowledge. A text compressor must

solve the same problem in order to assign the shortest codes to the most likely text sequences.

Models like ChatGPT are not ideal for the Hutter Prize for a variety of reasons, they might take more computational

resources than those allowed by the competition (computational and storage space).

Rules

[

]

The contest is open-ended. It is open to everyone. To enter, a competitor must submit a compression program and a

decompressor that decompresses to the file

enwik9

(formerly

enwik8

up to 2017).

It is also possible to submit a

compressed file instead of the compression program. The total size of the compressed file and decompressor (as a Win32

or Linux executable) must be less than or equal 99% of the previous prize winning entry. For each one percent

improvement, the competitor wins 5,000 euros. The decompression program must also meet execution time and memory

constraints.

Submissions must be published in order to allow independent verification. There is a 30-day waiting period for public

comment before awarding a prize. In 2017, the rules were changed to require the release of the source code under a

, out of concern that "past submissions [which did not disclose their source code] had been useless to

others and the ideas in them may be lost forever."

Winners

[

]

Author (enwik9)

Date

Program

Total size

Award

Kaido Orav and Byron Knoll

September 3, 2024

fx2-cmix

110,793,128

7,950€

Kaido Orav

February 2, 2024

fx-cmix

112,578,322

6,911€

Saurabh Kumar

July 16, 2023

fast cmix

114,156,155

5,187€

Artemiy Margaritov

May 31, 2021

starlit

115,352,938

9,000€

Alexander Rhatushnyak

July 4, 2019

phda9v1.8

116,673,681

No prize

Author (enwik8)

Date

Program

Total size

Award

Alexander Rhatushnyak

November 4, 2017

phda9

15,284,944

2,085€

Alexander Rhatushnyak

May 23, 2009

decomp8

15,949,688

1,614€

Alexander Rhatushnyak

May 14, 2007

paq8hp12

16,481,655

1,732€

Alexander Rhatushnyak

September 25, 2006

paq8hp5

17,073,018

3,416€

Matt Mahoney

March 24, 2006

paq8f

18,324,887

No prize