Calgary Compression Challenge is closing on May 20

[leob]

Dear colleagues,

In a few days, I will close my Calgary Compression Challenge which for 20 years provided some intermittent fun and/or profit to its participants, and, I hope, has saved many compression-related fora from long-winded discussions with crazy "inventors" by pointing them to the Challenge page.
Would anyone like to take the Calgary Compression Challenge from me and to continue it, with or without a monetary prize? Personally, I think that the Hutter Prize is enough, but if there is interest, I'd welcome it.
After all, the CCC is the oldest compression challenge.

Best regards,
Leo

[Jyrki Alakuijala]

Dear colleagues,

In a few days, I will close my Calgary Compression Challenge which for 20 years provided some intermittent fun and/or profit to its participants, and, I hope, has saved many compression-related fora from long-winded discussions with crazy "inventors" by pointing them to the Challenge page.
Would anyone like to take the Calgary Compression Challenge from me and to continue it, with or without a monetary prize? Personally, I think that the Hutter Prize is enough, but if there is interest, I'd welcome it.
After all, the CCC is the oldest compression challenge.

Best regards,
Leo

May I ask why you are planning to close it? In my eyes adding the full cost of compressor and decompressor to something as small as the Calgary Corpus seems not ideal, but the Hutter Prize is not the correct goal either: we rarely compress and decompress 100 M at once in real life.

[Stephan Busch]

Dear Leo

I want to add you to the Hall of Fame - please leave me a message with the details you want to share.

[leob]

May I ask why you are planning to close it? In my eyes adding the full cost of compressor and decompressor to something as small as the Calgary Corpus seems not ideal, but the Hutter Prize is not the correct goal either: we rarely compress and decompress 100 M at once in real life.

First, it's almost 6 years since the last improvement, and there was only one within the last 10 years, and previously the period between improvements was hardly greater than 4 years. Second, I think that the challenge has already served its purpose as of 10 years ago.

The rationale to include the cost of the decompressor (not the compressor, and it never was) and to consider the archive size rather than the sum of file sizes is to counteract any tricks which the "inventors" might be willing to play.

[leob]

Dear Stephan,

Thank you! I don't know what kind of relevant details to share apart from my being the originator of the CCCC. Maybe that I was the author of the Freeze compression tool, the first LZ77 UNIX compressor, and the first since compress(1), predating gzip. As a matter of fact, RMS was considering making freeze the GNU compressor, but InfoZip was chosen due to better compatibility with other tools.
Oh, and I'm also an IOCCC winner and its judge.

[Matt Mahoney]

I'll take it. http://mattmahoney.net/dc/calgary.html

[leob]

I'll take it. http://mattmahoney.net/dc/calgary.html

Thank you, Matt! When I update my page in a few days, I'll add the link.