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Marcus Hutter
Personal blog · hutter1.netaiscience
Marcus Hutter's personal blog at hutter1.net covers ai and science. Since 2007, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “Hutter Prize: Compress a 100MB file to less than the current record of 16 MB”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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39mentions?
32HN people?
2007–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- /ai/uaibook.htm7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2009-08-04
- /ai/aixigentle.htm4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2007-06-04
- Hutter Prize: Compress a 100MB file to less than the current record of 16 MB3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-08-11
- An algorithm that solves any problem as quickly as the fastest algorithm3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-01-28
- Algorithmic Information Theory2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-08-11
- Marcus' Artificial Intelligence Page2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-24
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-12-08
- Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability – AIXI (2005)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-04
- /ai/uaibook.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-25
What Hacker News says?
>2) So far, these tools are "better search" schemes, not actual intelligence. Sure, many find them very useful. But given this, the (voluntary or involuntary) providers of data ought to get credit/benefit for/from this phenomena, along with the tool creators. Especially giving the current situation is Microsoft/OpenAI selling to commercial software developers who sell to general public. What they are good at is pred…
Comment linking /ai/uaibook.htm
on “We've filed a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot”Submitted Hutter Prize: Compress a 100MB file to less than the current record of 16 MB as a story · 141 points
HN discussionThere is definitely a trade-off between brevity and efficiency/practicality. A classic example is "The Fastest and Shortest Algorithm for All Well-Defined Problems": > An algorithm M is described that solves any well-defined problem p as quickly as the fastest algorithm computing a solution to p, save for a factor of 5 and low-order additive terms Spoiler alert, the "algorithm M" is a brute-force search; the "low-or…
Comment linking /ai/pfastprg.htm
on “Go will use pdqsort in next release”Submitted Hutter Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge as a story · 55 points
HN discussion> It's the "Universal Turing Machine" for LLMs. A closer analogy is the Hutter Search ( http://hutter1.net/ai/pfastprg.pdf ), as it is also an algorithm that can solve any problem. And it is probably too inefficient to use in practice, like the Hutter Search.
Comment linking /ai/pfastprg.pdf
on “Chain of Thought empowers transformers to solve inherently serial problems”Submitted An algorithm that solves any problem as quickly as the fastest algorithm as a story · 37 points
HN discussionThis discussion is not complete without a mention of Marcus Hutter’s seminal book[0] “Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions Based On Algorithmic Probability”. It provides many of the formalisms upon which metrics of intelligence are based. The gaps in current AI tech are pretty explainable in this context. [0] https://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
Comment linking /ai/uaibook.htm
on “What is intelligence? (2024)”Submitted Marcus' Artificial Intelligence Page as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> if the universe is that simple does that imply a complex runtime? There is a tradeoff to be made between (algorithmic) information specified as a program/software versus an interpreter/hardware http://www.hutter1.net/publ/ctoex.pdf However, all we really need is a Turing-complete runtime, which can be very simple, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110 https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_com…
Comment linking /publ/ctoex.pdf
on “Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)”Submitted The Fastest and Shortest Algorithm for All Well-Defined Problems as a story · 4 points
HN discussion- nl · 2022-09-24
> The process of training is more-or-less just "building a search index", and prediction is little more than "looking up examples in the search index and combining". It's really not. You are compressing the information in that dataset. That means the model has to learn characteristics of the information in the data that represent it. This is one of the reasons why some argue that compression is a form of intelligenc…
Comment linking /ai/
on “Using GPT-3 to pathfind in random graphs” Submitted Algorithmic Information Theory as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnd the idea that compression is intelligence also should be mentioned: http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
Comment linking /ai/uaibook.htm
on “Lz_xor”Submitted Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability – AIXI (2005) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionActually there are at least two decades-old branches of computer science/mathematics that have formulated precise definitions of AI, and proved many theoretical results that gave way to lots of practical applications. These branches of CS are called "Reinforcement Learning" and "Universal AI". While Gwern has already mentioned Reinforcement Learning, UAI is a less known (but even more rigorous and well received) mat…
Comment linking /ai/uaibook.htm
on “Tool AIs want to be agent AIs”Submitted Algorithmic Information Theory as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> 2) (I assume) it needs to be self-extracting (and size includes the compression logic). Size includes decompression logic, which may be what you meant but it is important to distinguish between compression and decompression. http://www.hutter1.net/prize/hrules.htm#rules
Comment linking /prize/hrules.htm
on “Hutter Prize: Compress a 100MB file to less than the current record of 16 MB”The author, Marcus Hutter, created the "Hutter Prize" [1] that offers a C50,000 prize to persons who can compress 100Mb of a Wikipedia file to under 15Mb. From the prize site: This compression contest is motivated by the fact that being able to compress well is closely related to acting intelligently, thus reducing the slippery concept of intelligence to hard file size numbers. [1] http://www.hutter1.net/prize/index…
Comment linking /prize/index.htm
on “Hutter Prize: Compress a 100MB file to less than the current record of 16 MB”Since I did not see it in the article or in the comments here: Intelligence is compression / dimensionality reduction. Finding the essential parts of a problem/object/concept and creating a code book for it. The better you can compress things, the better you understand them. If you know that the left wing of a plane is the same as the right wing of a plane, but rotated/flipped, then you would not need to store (redu…
Comment linking /ai/pfastprg.htm
on “Is there a simple algorithm for intelligence?”Given unlimited computing power, AIXItl [1] is a pretty simple algorithm that can provably solve all problems, in some sense, at least as well as any other algorithm. The idea is to simply dovetail over all possible algorithms and select the ones that fit observations best. That includes humans, if you believe as I do that humans are computable. With limited computing power, it's likely that the best algorithms for…
Comment linking /ai/paixi.htm
on “Is there a simple algorithm for intelligence?”hell yeah I love community alias: jah interests: essentially every branch of philosophy, hacking/infosec, startups, cooking unusual meals, literature, math, theories of intelligence, sharing life stories, listening to smart people talk language(s): English and a little bit of French (still learning) link: http://www.hutter1.net/ait.htm (I like AIT a lot) info: вцудды0ч@gmail.com (English but typed with Russian keybo…
Comment linking /ait.htm
on “Ask HN: Who Wants a Penpal?”Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc... . Follow the chain a little bit and you'll come to things like: http://www.hutter1.net/publ/aixiaxiom2.pdf . Super interesting but very impractical.
Comment linking /publ/aixiaxiom2.pdf
on “Why 2015 Was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence”See also "Hutter Prize" http://www.hutter1.net/prize/index.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize
Comment linking /prize/index.htm
on “JPEG Committee releases a call for evidence for image compression based on AI”AIXI was neither invented by MIRI nor have they proved any nontrivial theorems about it. AIXI is Marcus Hutter's work: http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.htm
Comment linking /ai/aixigentle.htm
on “MIRI's Approach – Machine Intelligence Research Institute”I agree with /u/AnimalMuppet, FWIW. As long as I've been doing this stuff (and I've been doing it for quite some time) AGI has been interpreted (somewhat loosely) as something like "Intelligence equivalent to an average human adult" or just "human level intelligence". But as /u/AnimalMuppet points out, there's quite a bit of variance to human intelligence, and nobody ever really specified in detail exactly which "hu…
Comment linking /ai/uaibook.htm
on “I doubt that anything resembling genuine AGI is within reach of current AI tools”This depends on the assumption that 'intelligence' (and nobody can really agree on what that means, which is a bad start) is representable in algorithmic form. We have a working definition and know that it is algorithmically representable nowadays ( http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.htm ). Now the question is how you can make the algorithm efficiently computable.
Comment linking /ai/aixigentle.htm
on “The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist's View”> The external Israeli contractor caused this mess by using inadequate sandboxing, with agents without an saferails. You are being too kind. In the early says of AI, papers were published showing that any sufficiently intelligent system tasked with a goal will treat its operating environment as a resource constraint to be optimized or bypassed [0] [1] [2]. You don't need to be a expert in AI to know once you have th…
Comment linking /ai/pkcunai.htm
on “OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity”Well, messiness is just one part of the problem. I usually see AI as a layered system that solves a general problem. The layers are broadly: lower level sensory systems(vision, speech recognition) and higher level symbolic reasoning systems. Recently, there has a been a lot of success in the lower layers due to Machine Learning and probabilistic systems. The messiness comes in the lower layers. When dealing with the…
Comment linking /ai/uaibook.htm
on “Super Mario AI Competition”There has been some research in formal and universal models of AI. See below for an example. Universal AI: http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm
Comment linking /ai/uaibook.htm
on “The end of AI winter?”> Perhaps a mathematical model of computation might help, of computable functions and Kolomogorov/Solomonoff program length to compute them. Using this model, the search space of functions increases exponentially with program length - but at what rate would the number of "interesting" computable functions increase? And with what density (with respect to the search space, i.e. how hard they are to find)? Like AIXI? h…
Comment linking /ai/aixigentle.htm
on “The Singularity is not coming”
