Hutter Prize

The Hutter Prize is a cash prize funded by Marcus Hutter which rewards data compression improvements on a specific 1 GB English text file, with the goal of encouraging research in artificial intelligence (AI). Launched in 2006, the prize awards 5,000 euros for each one percent improvement (with 500,000 euros total funding) in the compressed size of the file enwik9, which is the larger of two files used in the Large Text Compression Benchmark (LTCB); enwik9 consists of the first 109 bytes of a specific version of English Wikipedia. The ongoing competition is organized by Hutter, Matt Mahoney, and Jim Bowery. The prize was announced on August 6, 2006 with a smaller text file: enwik8 consisting of 100MB. On February 21, 2020 both the dataset and the total prize pool were expanded by a factor of 10: from enwik8 of 100MB to enwik9 of 1GB; from 50,000 to 500,000 euros.