Completely agree, and I think this is where a lot of the confusion in the thread is coming from. The prize claims to compress “human knowledge” but it’s actuall

Completely agree, and I think this is where a lot of the confusion in the thread is coming from. The prize claims to compress “human knowledge” but it’s actually a fairly rigid natural language text compression challenge. I’d conjecture that the algorithms that do well (as measured by compression ratio) on this particular corpus will also do well on corpuses that contain minimal ‘knowledge’. Compression algorithms that do well might encode a lot of data about syntax, word triple frequencies, and Wikipedia editorial style, but I really doubt they’ll encode much “knowledge”.