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 5000 euros for each one percent improvement (with 500,000 euros total funding)[1] in the compressed size of the file enwik9, which is the larger of two files used in the Large Text Compression Benchmark (LTCB);[2] enwik9 consists of the first 109 bytes of a specific version of English Wikipedia.
The organizers further believe that compressing natural language text is a hard AI problem, equivalent to passing the Turing test.
They argue that predicting which characters are most likely to occur next in a text sequence requires vast real-world knowledge.
The total size of the compressed file and decompressor (as a Win32 or Linux executable) must be less than or equal 99% of the previous prize winning entry.