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Submission + - Leak-Proof AI Benchmark Posts Biggest Gain in 20 Years, on One CPU Core (spasim.org)

Baldrson writes: The Hutter Prize for lossless compression of human knowledge has paid out nearly €50,000: its largest advance in 20 years: three entries together cut the record for compressing a 1GB Wikipedia snapshot by nearly 10%: a compression ratio of more than a factor of 10. Every entry ran on a single CPU core, in about 50 hours and under 10GB of RAM, so the gain came from algorithms.

Unlike most AI benchmarks, the prize requires no validation data, so a leak can't inflate a score. The full file is public, and the size of the decompressor counts against the entry, so anything memorized is paid for in bits. Vladimir Ivanov's fx2-cmix-T now holds the record, after earlier 2026 gains by Ibrahim Marcouch and Kaido Orav (cmix-lex) and David Freelan (cmix-obias). Sponsor Marcus Hutter, who advised DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg's 2008 thesis "Machine Super Intelligence," calls it "the largest progress in its 20-year history." With trillions riding on claims of AI progress and data-center power demand, is a leak-proof, energy-limited benchmark the yardstick the industry should be watching?

(Disclosure: the submitter is on the Hutter Prize committee.)

Comment Re:Pay people better (Score 0, Troll) 173

It's been tried and doesn't work. Heck, Britain's fertility rate was several times higher when the masses lived in slums and worked in mills until they died in an accident or from respiratory illness.

If you want to increase birth rates you need to stop educating girls beyond what's required to be a mother. But no liberal country can do that so they will die out instead.

Comment Re: China is a totalitarian hell (Score 2, Insightful) 142

Regardless of its faults, China is a serious country like the US and Europe used to be.

Serious countries don't let people with important skills and knowledge travel to hostile countries where they might be kidnapped or defect. It's so obviously a bad idea that it's bizarre that I even have to point it out.

Comment Re:China is a totalitarian hell (Score 0) 142

These were people who worked in defence so anywhere behind the Iron Curtain was right out and I imagine Cuba would have been too. Even Austria was considered a risk, probably because so many spies would hang out there from both sides.

Or so they told me. I can't be entirely sure they weren't exagerrating.

Comment Re:China is a totalitarian hell (Score 0, Troll) 142

You're right. Some of my friends were banned from travel to communist or communist-adjacent countries during the Cold War, by a supposedly 'freedom-loving' country.

And I don't think Western countries typically allow people under investigation for serious crimes to leave unless they're pedos with connections.

Comment Re:"reached orbit" is a misnomer (Score 3, Interesting) 72

NASA followed the "we launch when the paperwork weights more than the rocket" model where everything had to be tested to death on the ground. Even so, many people expected the first Saturn V launch to fail, and they only launched a complete rocket because it was faster than testing the first stage with a mass simulator on top. And it was never fully debugged before the program was shut down.

SpaceX follow the software development model where you break things fast, and complaining that they didn't get to orbit the first time (something they haven't even tried to do before this flight) is like complaining that someone wrote some code from scratch and the first try didn't compile. They've also been able to test a lot of potential failure modes (e.g. deliberately removing heatshield tiles or flying more dangerous reentries) because they're flying often and willing to break things.

One result of this is that a single SLS engine probably costs more than an entire Starship/Super Heavy stack. Even the ones that were taken off Space Shuttles and refurbished.

Comment OK... (Score 5, Interesting) 47

I don't really care enough about RSA to read deeply into the paper, but it seems to exploit a service that will sign billions of your messages with the secret key that you are trying to crack... which I seem to recall was known to be a potential problem for RSA thirty years ago (so don't do that).

Comment Re:So (Score 2) 126

A cheap Windows PC is now around $1,000. If you don't need Windows you can use one of these instead and even at current inflated prices it costs a lot less than that Windows PC.

I also have one running as a frontend to some local AI servers, with Open WebUI, Opencode and other things that don't require much CPU power. I'd rather them running on a box that I can wipe and reinstall if the AI software decides it wants to take over the machine and do dastardly things to it than direct on the users' computer or the AI servers.

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