First, the competition does place a time limit (in fact several resource limits). I agree that it may be too lax to judge consumer-oriented compression algorith

First, the competition does place a time limit (in fact several resource limits). I agree that it may be too lax to judge consumer-oriented compression algorithms. That is not what this competition is about. The goal is maximizing compression ratio - with the aim of affecting AI. Since an AI system can be seen as a lossy compression where some worldly input is compressed into something that we hope mimics "understanding". Improvements in compression may translate to AI advances [0] and potentially vice versa. To draw a parallel away from computing: One could say we are compressors that experience the world and compress it to loose what we don't care about. Improving our compression is basically akin to "knowing more" or "remembering more of the right things". See Schmidhuber [1]. [0] http://prize.hutter1.net/hfaq.htm#compai http://prize.hutter1.net/hfaq.htm#compai [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360