bzip is not very intelligent, true, but it does develop some model of its input. It's not like there's a linear relationship between between compression ratio and IQ or anything.

I'm not arguing that compression algorithms don't produce models of their inputs, some even use neural nets or other stochastic predictors with correction terms etc.

This doesn't address the only part I really commented on, which is the connection between intelligence and compression.

There were experiments that zipped music pieces, I think, and then classified the compressed files by similarity. They got rather interesting resuls. But I do not remember much details. It was, I believe, about 20 years ago.

Asked Google: "Clustering by compression".

That sounds like a really cool project, I will def give it a look.

I still think this has much more to do with the structure of language than the abstract conception I have of intelligence, and I would be interested in having conversation w/ someone for whom the opposite is true.