Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 197 posts

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

#171

Post by jl2718 »

Tenoke wrote: post #120
75dvtwin wrote: post #118

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 che…

>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.

I have a 5€ note I found blowing in the wind while running at an abandoned construction site. I asked everybody in the vicinity if they dropped it, but I still feel awful about picking it up, because I didn’t and don’t feel I can do justice by dropping it. It’s made me realize I may have moral failures from earlier in my life that I never bothered to commit to memory because I wouldn’t have thought of them that way. A child would have felt glee, and I don’t know when that should have or did change in me.

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

#173

Post by xigency »

lultimouomo wrote: post #129
ribs wrote: post #87

It really worries me how many people are so quick to forgive him and tell him so. In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. At least, they would have, if someone did something like that. But my parents didn’t raise mendacious villains. Look at this crap on Twitter: “Everyone makes mistakes. Thank you for the apology”. “Kagglers will still love to have you back” “It's great t…

> In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. He was publicly shamed, banned from Kaggle and he lost his job (and I guess he's basically unhireable right now). I wonder what would be your family reaction, if these things don't sound like consequences to you.

Losing his job is one thing, but maybe it's time he got a job doing something else.

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

#174

Post by blurps »

endorphone wrote: post #70
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 was interesting, and drew a lot of attention to it, but ultimately wasn't that simply stuffed into the trash bin? Not long after that, Netflix basically abandoned both user ratings of significance, and realistic recommendations. Now it's just a nonsense engine with some sort of meaningless overlap or whatever they call it.

> into the trash bin?

They did not implement the winning solution as is, but a lot of good stuff came from the winning teams, including techniques (such as SVD) that are in use as of today (or maybe a few years back).

> just a nonsense engine

No, it is safe to assume the recommendation engine of Netflix is close to the state-of-the-art. A lot of money and talent went into it.

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

#175

Post by AstralStorm »

throwaway100773 wrote: post #145
cowsandmilk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For people who are naturally gifted, successful at young age -- why cheat? Many are used to being the best. There’s an old saying that 90% of students aren’t in the top 10% at Harvard. When your entire life, you’ve been the smartest kid in your class, it is a tough adjustment when that is no longer true. So they try to find ways to get that top rank again. How can you ensure your kid can handle this? Make sure they…

This is probably true but not an excuse for the perverted behavior and incentives that result. If 90% of the students at Harvard aren’t in the top 10% but feel entitled to be and thus cheating becomes a more attractive solution than taking the medicine of reality - clearly the penalties for cheating aren’t quite high enough.

Penalties don't work when only a few cheats are found.

In this case, the cheat was obvious, but how do you detection enrollment cheats or totally bought research projects? It's not even funny how little you can do here.

Even plain and obvious plagiarism is being missed.

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

#176

Post by AstralStorm »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #170
dlkf wrote: post #158

A large number of commenters fundamentally misunderstand what happened. They are saying "why did he upload his scraped training data? Why didn't he just train on it and upload the resulting model?" If you are making this argument, it means that you don't understand the contest. User rahimnathwani explains: > In this competition, the training code was run on Kaggle's system, so you'd still need to smuggle in the extra…

AFAIK it's impossible to smuggle it in a way that you can't be caught. Maybe the use of MD5 made it easier to see but if examined I don't think there's a totally hidden solution.

Yes, he could have trained a network to recognize them and return memorized values. It would not be nearly as obvious.

Solving this would require changing the contest so that it comes with algorithm and instructions only (no data files, entropy checks) and is trained by contest operators.

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

#177

Post by 45ure »

ribs wrote: post #87

It really worries me how many people are so quick to forgive him and tell him so. In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. At least, they would have, if someone did something like that. But my parents didn’t raise mendacious villains. Look at this crap on Twitter: “Everyone makes mistakes. Thank you for the apology”. “Kagglers will still love to have you back” “It's great t…

>In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences.

You picked a random sample of ratio'd comments from a platform which is big on performative wokeness to strengthen your opinion, which still fails to explain how Pleskov managed to zugzwang his way into pulling off a Kobayashi Maru style move and the failure of the platform to monitor such abuses. Only time will tell, whether or not he has avoided being a part of the Dark Triad; without condoning his behaviour ─ what more can he do to atone for his sins?

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

#178

Post by [deleted] »

ribs wrote: post #87

It really worries me how many people are so quick to forgive him and tell him so. In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. At least, they would have, if someone did something like that. But my parents didn’t raise mendacious villains. Look at this crap on Twitter: “Everyone makes mistakes. Thank you for the apology”. “Kagglers will still love to have you back” “It's great t…

[deleted]

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

ribs wrote: post #87

It really worries me how many people are so quick to forgive him and tell him so. In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. At least, they would have, if someone did something like that. But my parents didn’t raise mendacious villains. Look at this crap on Twitter: “Everyone makes mistakes. Thank you for the apology”. “Kagglers will still love to have you back” “It's great t…

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by QuercusMax »

bart_spoon wrote: post #164

I was pretty surprised by how common this type of behavior is on Kaggle. I work in machine learning and data science, but I don't use Kaggle much because it quickly became clear competitions boiled down to who could eek out the last hundredths of a percent in accuracy from models trained for weeks on multithousand dollar machines, and because the behavior described in the article was surprisingly common. That said, t…

Is a "multithousand dollar machine" supposed to be expensive? Any company with even half-decent resources should be able to put hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware toward training a model.
Post reply on HN