Hutter Prize - History

History

The prize was announced on August 6, 2006. The prize baseline was 18,324,887 bytes, achieved by PAQ8F.

On August 16, Rudi Cilibrasi submitted a modified version of PAQ8F called RAQ8G that added parenthesis modeling. However it failed to meet the 1% threshold.

On the same day, but a few hours later Dmitry Shkarin submitted a modified version of his DURILCA compressor called DURILCA 0.5h, which improved compression by 1.5%. However it was disqualified for using 1.75 GB of memory. The decision to disqualify was controversial because the memory limits were not clearly specified in the rules at the time.

On August 21, Alexander Ratushnyak submitted PAQ8HKCC, a modified version of PAQ8H, which improved compression by 2.6% over PAQ8F. He continued to improve the compression to 3.0% with PAQ8HP1 on August 21, 4% with PAQ8HP2 on August 28, 4.9% with PAQ8HP3 on September 3, 5.9% with PAQ8HP4 on September 10, and 5.9% with PAQ8HP5 on September 25. At that point he was awarded 3416 euros and the new baseline was set to 17,245,509 bytes. He has since improved this by 1% with PAQ8HP6 on November 6, 2% with PAQ8HP7 on December 10, and 2.3% with PAQ8HP8 on January 18, 2007. The compressed size is 16,681,045 bytes. On July 10, 2007, he once again broke his record with PAQ8HP12, achieving a size of 16,481,655 bytes, and was awarded 1732 euros. On May 23, 2009, he got a new record with decomp8, achieving a size of 15,949,688 bytes for an award of 1614 euros.