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

THIS! Drop the "slightly"... I can't understand how people focus so much on the competition cheating, and so less on "wait, wtf are they doing here"... I mean, even if they are not deciding whether to euthanize or not based on this, you're still building a system that introduces "good looks" as a factor in a life-and-death decision regarding a living being.

It's not hard to jump from this a system that would use your facebook file to grant or deny medical health coverage or a similar life-and-death thing. Shift the Overton-window a little, push is a few notches further, and you're re-inventing phrenology with deep learning...

This is bone-chilling! I mean the fact that so many people overlook this...

This is a really good point!

Considering the guy was smart (he is kaggle grandmaster), I would really like to know what prevented him from training on the scraped data, and what motivated him to obfuscate the known sample lookup.

Maybe there's some technicality they made it impossible to tune the model on the additional scraped training data.

Unfortunately, most pet shelters get more pets than their facilities are able to handle. Unless they're a no-kill shelter (in order to be considered one they need to kill <10%), they will need to euthanize in order to make room for incoming animals. This is as opposed to promoting adoption, fostering, etc. An algorithm that can prematurely decide what animals will be adopted, or have the best chance to be, can create a perverse incentive to euthanize early the less optimal pets.

It was briefly discussed about 7 days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045696

I posted there, same self-addressed question, that I cannot figure out the answer to...

It seems that intensives to cheat, and environment where 'means justify the ways' -- are overpowering.

For people who are naturally gifted, successful at young age -- why cheat?

Was this historically, always like this?

These insensitive to cheat, to gain unfair advantage, to treat life opportunities without any 'honor code' just seem to be so pervasive now, it seems.

There is a cheating scandal every other week involving most prestigious institutions, competitions, and so on.

These incentives to cheat, basically destroy from inside our commercial model, academics, judicial system, political system and probably military too.

This also creates a new type of powerful currency, and therefore the 'billionaires' in that currency have infinite power -- and that currency is 'dirt on somebody'.

Dirt on somebody who cheated before -- forever makes the cheaters into tools of injustice.

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Public shaming is reactive, there we need something more proactive at various points. There are needs to be incentives for work verification, as an example.

I also think it is unfortunate but at least civil/commercial law in many countries is pretty much riddled with 'more expensive lawyers produce better results'. And it skews society into basically thinking 'anything goes, really. means justify the ways, and cheating something one can get away with'

>Was this historically, always like this?

Of course. 20$ bills left on the floor are bound to be picked by someone even if most won't.

..At least as long as the expexted punishment comes down to less than the value of said bills.