The Hutter Prize

Just informed of this work, via a podcast referenced below.  Still aiming to make some further sense of this in general.  Technical.

The Hutter Prize Site
Being able to compress well is closely related to intelligence as explained below. While intelligence is a slippery concept, file sizes are hard numbers. Wikipedia is an extensive snapshot of Human Knowledge. If you can compress the first 1GB of Wikipedia better than your predecessors, your (de)compressor likely has to be smart(er). The intention of this prize is to encourage development of intelligent compressors/programs as a path to AGI. ... 

Interview with Lex Fridman (26.Feb'20) (Video, Audio, Tweet)  ... " 

In the Wikipedia (The Hutter Prize)
"... The goal of the Hutter Prize is to encourage research in artificial intelligence (AI). The organizers believe that text compression and AI are equivalent problems. Hutter proved that the optimal behavior of a goal seeking agent in an unknown but computable environment is to guess at each step that the environment is probably controlled by one of the shortest programs consistent with all interaction so far.[4] However, there is no general solution because Kolmogorov complexity is not computable. Hutter proved that in the restricted case (called AIXItl) where the environment is restricted to time t and space l, a solution can be computed in time O(t2l), which is still intractable.

The organizers further believe that compressing natural language text is a hard AI problem, equivalent to passing the Turing test. Thus, progress toward one goal represents progress toward the other.[5] They argue that predicting which characters are most likely to occur next in a text sequence requires vast real-world knowledge. A text compressor must solve the same problem in order to assign the shortest codes to the most likely text sequences.  .... "