The JaSP network has beaten Mike Goldman's $5000 compression challenge. In 2001, Patrick Craig attempted this challenge without achieving compression. This time, the same original file from that first attempt has been compressed to 79 %.
The result is not a decompressor and a compressed file, but a single self-extracting archive. The program is a shell script relying on standard commands and interfaces present in a Linux system. The decompression method is an inefficient probabilistic algorithm tuned to the expected data. It does not depend on filesystem metadata or network sources. This algorithm could possibly be used to win Steve Tate's $100 wager too.
The successful test ended on October 7, 2018, at 22:19:02 UTC, after almost
2 hours of runtime. The SHA-256 checksum of the program is:
7e0d34a1d9489f9982c755d3a4d0efa81ff5b5a4ee6e51e6802a38c3644364c9.
Published: 2018-10-08 03:59