Compression Challenge
The Calgary corpus Compression and SHA-1 crack Challenge is a contest started by Leonid A. Broukhis on May 21, 1996 to compress the 14 file version of the Calgary corpus. The contest offers a small cash prize which has varied over time. Currently the prize is US $1 per 111 byte improvement over the previous result.
According to the rules of the contest, an entry must consist of both the compressed data and the decompression program packed into one of several standard archive formats. Time and memory limits, archive formats, and decompression languages have been relaxed over time. Currently the program must run within 24 hours on a 2000 MIPS machine under Windows or Linux and use less than 800 MB memory. An SHA-1 challenge was later added. It allows the decompression program to output files different from the Calgary corpus as long as they hash to the same values as the original files. So far, that part of the challenge has not been met.
The first entry received was 759,881 bytes in September, 1997 by Malcolm Taylor (author of RK and WinRK). The most recent entry was 580,170 bytes by Alexander Ratushnyak on July, 2, 2010. The entry consists of a compressed file of size 572,465 bytes and a decompression program written in C++ and compressed to 7700 bytes as a PPMd var. I archive, plus 5 bytes for the compressed file name and size. The history is as follows.
| Size (bytes) | Month/year | Author |
|---|---|---|
| 759,881 | 09/1997 | Malcolm Taylor |
| 692,154 | 08/2001 | Maxim Smirnov |
| 680,558 | 09/2001 | Maxim Smirnov |
| 653,720 | 11/2002 | Serge Voskoboynikov |
| 645,667 | 01/2004 | Matt Mahoney |
| 637,116 | 04/2004 | Alexander Ratushnyak |
| 608,980 | 12/2004 | Alexander Ratushnyak |
| 603,416 | 04/2005 | Przemysław Skibiński |
| 596,314 | 10/2005 | Alexander Ratushnyak |
| 593,620 | 12/2005 | Alexander Ratushnyak |
| 589,863 | 05/2006 | Alexander Ratushnyak |
| 580,170 | 07/2010 | Alexander Ratushnyak |
Since 2004, all submissions are variants of PAQ and submitted as source code licensed under GPL.
Read more about this topic: Calgary Corpus
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