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The $5000 Compression Challenge (2001)

(www.patrickcraig.co.uk)
181 points ekiauhce | 1 comments | 23 Nov 24 21:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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omoikane ◴[24 Nov 24 00:14 UTC] No.42224958[source]▶
The original email thread was from 2001, and it gets posted to HN periodically:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=patrickcraig.co.uk

For another compression challenge that is still ongoing, try "500000€ Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge" (also known as "Hutter Prize"):

http://prize.hutter1.net/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502329 - Hutter Prize for compressing human knowledge (2023-09-13, 215 comments)

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vlovich123 ◴[24 Nov 24 00:53 UTC] No.42225155[source]▶
I have a fundamental problem with the Hutter prize stating that intelligence is related to compression & then sponsoring a prize for lossless compression. Intelligence is related to lossy compression. Lossless is mainly a mechanistic act.
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1. pizza ◴[25 Nov 24 01:52 UTC] No.42232462[source]▶
"If it were a fact, it wouldn't be called intelligence."

I think the other way to read it is that you're fundamentally going to have to choose (by your freedom to control your algorithm's design) which of the maps from (2^|x|) -> (2^|compress(x)|) are the ones that actually end up getting no compression (ie |compress(x)| actually > |x| - bc of pigeonhole principle) and which ones are the ones that do get to be called compressed. So you do have an implied kind of lossiness w.r.t. to what parts of the input domain are actually compressed.