This idea is a generalization of Solomonoff's work on induction from the dawn of Computing. Solomonoff was one of the initial 3 discoverers of Kolmogorov Complexity (Chaitin being the other). MDL is an attempt at a computable Kolmogorov Complexity, however creating a codebook is difficult so MDL is no panacea. Hutter's work is more broad, being interested in the intelligence of an Agent and uses ideas like MDL and compression.