Marcus Hutter has announced the 50,000 Euro Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge by compressing the 100MB file Wikipedia ‘enwik8’ file to less than the current record of 18MB.

The intent of this prize is to encourage development of intelligent compressors/programs.

“Being able to compress well is closely related to intelligence,” says the Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge” website.

“While intelligence is a slippery concept, file sizes are hard numbers. Wikipedia is an extensive snapshot of Human Knowledge. If you can compress the first 100MB of Wikipedia better than your predecessors, you(r compressor) likely has to be smart(er).”