The Hutter Prize: Compression, prediction, and the limits of intelligence

I texted Don about a side gig: €5,000 for every 1% you shave off a zip file.

It's a real contest. For 20 years, Marcus Hutter has offered €500,000 to anyone who can losslessly compress a gigabyte of Wikipedia below 110 megabytes. Gzip gets you to 322. After that you're on your own.

So we tried. Run-length encoding. Pointing back instead of repeating yourself. Huffman coding worked out by hand. Arithmetic coding, which spends less than one bit per character. Then Claude Shannon's 1951 guessing game, and a paper where an LLM beats every record and still wins nothing, because the model counts against you.

Don wanted the euros. I had other reasons for bringing him over.

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