Posted on Sunday, July 15 2007 @ 11:02 CEST by Thomas De MaesschalckHe managed to compress the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including the decompression program):
Thereby he not only won the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also 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. >/blockquote>
