enh. The hutter prize is working on textual data which is already extremely information dense. The 200:1 goal is likely unreasonable to losslessly compress the

enh. The hutter prize is working on textual data which is already extremely information dense. The 200:1 goal is likely unreasonable to losslessly compress their data, but you can't say that for sure by reasoning from the hutter prize. Their page also has a scoreboard. I'm sure they're quite interested in solutions which achieve state of the art compression even if its far from their goal. Presumably their ultimate solution will be lossy, in which case 200:1 is possibly reasonable*. But it is much harder to judge lossy compression, which makes lossless compression a more interesting target. Insights that allow state of the art lossless compression may also be helpful for lossy compression. * 4k 60fps rgb data is about 12gbit/sec. but we send 4k lossy compressed video at 50mbit/sec -- which is more than a 200 to 1 compression ratio.