Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:
The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.
The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:
Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize
Hutter's* AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where "simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you currently know about the universe.
He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones. Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of these can have probability higher than p.
-- Matt Mahoney
*Marcus Hutter himself, as of March 24, 2006, after reading an online discussion of the C-Prize has said he finds the C-Prize approach to be "an excellent idea".
**The suggestion that the formula for C-Prize awards be modeled after the M-Prize was made by Neil Halelamien in a discussion of the prize on Slashdot.