AI professor Marcus Hutter has gone big with his challenge to the artificial intelligence community. A 500,000€ purse now backs "The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge". Contestants compete to compress Wikipedia. to its essence. The 1 billion character excerpt of Wikipedia called "enwik9" is approximately the amount that a human can read in a lifetime.<p>Hutter's challenge is an advance over the Turing Test. Devised by the famous AI theorist, Alan Turing, a chat bot must be able to fool a human. It is pass-fail. The Hutter Prize incrementally awards distillation of Wikipedia's storehouse of human knowledge to its essence. This judging criterion derives from a mathematical theory of natural science, informally known as "Occam's Razor". Formally it is called Algorithmic Information Theory or AIT. AIT is, according to Hutter's "AIXI" theory, essential to Universal Intelligence.<p>Hutter's judging criterion is superior to Turing's in 3 ways:<p>1) It is objective,
2) It rewards incremental improvements,
3) It is founded on a mathematical theory of natural science.<p>http://prize.hutter1.net/