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A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

theregister.co.uk

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Re: A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

#21

Post by guelo »

nefitty wrote: post #5
floatingatoll wrote: post #4

> " For me, it was never about the money but rather about the Kaggle points " Accumulated integer counts that represent social value and/or standing encourage destructive behavior.

It’s so fascinating to see how easily a human brain can be hijacked by status. I wonder if there’s a way to harness that power for improving individual performance...

Elementary shchool teachers use it all the time. Just some stickers and a leaderboard in the classroom and it works wonders for behavior and achievement.

Re: A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

#22

Post by sillysaurusx »

floatingatoll wrote: post #15
smogcutter wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...he said, and then refreshed HN.

Propose HN: 'Countless' experiment – hiding all karmic integers : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267 Perhaps someday we'll get a week without them.

No chance. HN’s goal is to have every effective programmer in the world checking it at least once a week. Anything that gets in the way of that is de facto bad.

(I’d love to be surprised, though.)

You can get the same effect with a Tampermonkey script I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200

It even scrambles the karma count in your profile, so there’s no opportunity for karma to affect you.

Re: A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

#23

Post by djannzjkzxn »

nefitty wrote: post #5
floatingatoll wrote: post #4

> " For me, it was never about the money but rather about the Kaggle points " Accumulated integer counts that represent social value and/or standing encourage destructive behavior.

It’s so fascinating to see how easily a human brain can be hijacked by status. I wonder if there’s a way to harness that power for improving individual performance...

Indeed, such mechanisms exist in the form of raises, promotions, bonuses, etc.

Re: A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

#25

Post by blurps »

bitxbit wrote: post #3

Never understood Kaggle. The Netflix Prize was great. Now it’s just people gaming Kaggle to get a job.

The Netflix Prize winners regularly compete on Kaggle. One of the top 10 Netflix Prize winners joined Kaggle early on (he got a job out of it). Kaggle competitions are a game. Most notorious players already have a good job.

Re: A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

#27

Post by nourse »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #24
mmhsieh wrote: post #2

Is there a public list of all known Kaggle cheats?

Can you write a ML program to predict if someone is cheating based on their submission?

Yes. Well I call it ML, but in reality it just checks HN for articles about their username cheating.

Re: A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

#28

Post by blurps »

eanzenberg wrote: post #12

I never understood Kaggle. Most competitions don't require code to be submitted, just predictions to be made on a test set with missing labels. So, you don't even need to apply machine learning and I'd bet money that lots of winners don't and label by hand or outsource. I don't understand the fascination and appeal of these so-called "grandmasters".

Winners have to submit code most of the times. There are sporadic computer vision competitions where it is possible to hand-label (such as geo-int competitions where people reverse engineered the flight paths), but vast majority it is impossible to hand-label. Nobody becomes a grandmaster without applying world-class machine learning skills.

The "cheater" in this competition is both a world-class data scientist and a reverse engineering hacker. Heck, people used to write papers about how they crawled the ground truth. Now they see their name in the newspaper.

Re: A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

#29

Post by blurps »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #26

Wouldn’t it be smarter to use the hidden data as training data rather than hard code it in?

This only works when you don't win. You have to upload your code, including model training code, they won't accept a trained model binary.

Re: A Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25k AI contest with hidden code

#30

Post by harry8 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #20
mmhsieh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Napoleon Bonaparte: “Give me enough medals and I'll win you any war”

Also true if you exclude the bit about medals.

And this is why everyone in Russia speaks french to this day!
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