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DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

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Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#121

Post by bgwalter »

tgma wrote: post #39
bgwalter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies valued at $300 billion or more are not another individual and people are not "sharing" their works. The companies are stealing them. For the majority of interesting output people have paid for art, music, software, journalism. But you know that already and are justifying the industry that pays your bills.

> valued at $300 billion Irrelevant really. Invoking this in the argument shows the basis is jealousy. They are clearly valued as such not because they collected all the data and stored in some database. Your local library is not worth 300 billion. > For the majority of interesting output people have paid for art, music, software, journalism Absolutely and demonstrably false. Music and art predate Copyright by hundre…

Copyright was only necessary with mass reproduction. The Gutenberg Bible does not yet qualify. The Berne Convention started in 1886, where the problem became more pressing.

And as I said, art was always paid for. In the case of monarchies, at least their advisers usually had good taste, unlike rich people today.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#122

Post by bgwalter »

chpatrick wrote: post #77
bgwalter wrote: post #35

A database is good at leetcode, who would have thought. Give humans a database and they'll outperform your "AI" (which probably uses an extraordinary amount of graphics cards and electricity). It is an idiotic benchmark, in line with the rest of the "AI" propaganda.

Where is this magic ICPC competition answers database that they're using?

"Database" was not meant in a literal sense. Clearly a lot of knowledge from similar problems is encoded in the model, that is why you can use models as a kind of fuzzy encyclopedia.

It is like an open book exam for humans where they also can lookup similar problems.

The current top comment makes the same point, but in a more diplomatic and sophisticated manner.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#123

Post by stevenhuang »

theragra wrote: post #102
amluto wrote: post #59

I've contemplated this a bit, and I think I have a bit of an unconventional take: First, this is really impressive. Second, with that out of the way, these models are not playing the same game as the human contestants, in at least two major regards. First, and quite obviously, they have massive amounts of compute power, which is kind of like giving a human team a week instead of five hours. But the models that are co…

I think your analogy is lacking. Human brain is much more efficient, so it is not right to say "giving a human team a week instead of five hours". Most likely, the whole OpenAI compute cannot match one brain in terms of connections and relations and computation power.

As always with these comparisons you neglect to account for the eons necessary for evolution to create human brains.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#124

Post by stevesimmons »

tgma wrote: post #76
stevesimmons wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former ICPC winner, I'd say ICPC is mainly a test of teamwork, given the format of the competition (3 team mates, one computer, scoring that rewards clean solutions submitted quicker, tackled in the optimal order for your three sets of skills, etc). Sure, you need to be individually good at thinking, etc. But the difference between 1st and places further down the ranking is teamwork.

As a former ICPC participant, albeit not first place (hats off to you), I would generally characterize it as "having a good team," much more so than what's usually considered "teamwork." It is a parallelization/scheduling effort than deep interpersonal collaboration. (In a certain sense, this is actually the ideal "teamwork" setup in the industry as well, to have a bunch of people who own their part and are trusted b…

The teams we beat trained as individuals and were selected competitively against each other as their school's "best 3".

We were "just" three friends who had studied together for 4 years, knew each other's strengths and weaknesses intimately, and then for the comp trained intensively on optimising the "parallelization/scheduling" aspects (as you put it) to get the best score in the minimum time. That included both the logistical and mental aspects of recovering from setbacks midway through the 5 hour problem sets.

During the finals, you'd be surprised how many teams' teamwork we saw fall apart when three very smart people under intense time pressure hit unexpectedly failing submissions with the bottleneck of a single computer. ICPC is a genius format.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#125

Post by GolfPopper »

birktj wrote: post #31
XenophileJKO wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So outside of human intervention, I don't think the specifics really matter. What this means is that it is possible and that this capability will in time be commoditized. This is helpful in framing the conversation, especially with "skeptics" of what these models are capable of.

To a certain extent I agree. But as far as I know I cannot go to chatgpt.com and paste the newest ICPC problems and get full solutions. And there is no information about what they do differently. For a competition like the ICPC, which is academic in its nature, I think it is very unfortunate to setup a seperate AI track like this without publishing clear public information about what that actually entails. And have c…

Mechanical Turking, in the original sense of the word.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#126

Post by gerash »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #57

ICPC = The International Collegiate Programming Contest. These are college level programmers, not elite competitive programmers. Apparently Gemini solved one problem (running on who knows what kind of cluster) by burning 30 min of "thinking" time on it, and at a cost that Google have declined to provide. According to one prior competition paricipant, writing in the comments section of this ArsClasica coverage, each y…

ICPC world finals questions are not easy. Idk what your talking about

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#127

Post by [deleted] »

smokel wrote: post #53

The best thing of the ICPC is the first C, which stands for "collegiate". It means that you get to solve a set of problems with three persons, but with only one computer. This means that you have to be smart about who is going to spend time coding, thinking, or debugging. The time pressure is intense, and it really is a team sport. It's also extra fun if one of the team members prefers a Dvorak keyboard layout and vi…

[deleted]

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#128

Post by gxs »

Swizec wrote: post #115
asboans wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses… first, and quite obviously they have massive amounts of horsepower, which is kind of like giving a team of horses… many more horses. But also cars have an absolutely massive fuel capacity. Petrol is such an efficient store of chemical energy compared to hay and cars can store gallons of it. I…

> Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses Yes. That’s why cars don’t compete in equestrian events and horses don’t go to F1 races. This non-controversial surely? You want different events for humans, humans + computers, and just computers. Notice that self driving cars have separate race events from both horses and human-driven cars…

Yeah I think the only thing OP was passing judgement on is on the competition aspect of it, not the actual achievement of any human or non human participant

That’s how I read it at least - exactly how you put it

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#129

Post by GoatInGrey »

asboans wrote: post #104
amluto wrote: post #59

I've contemplated this a bit, and I think I have a bit of an unconventional take: First, this is really impressive. Second, with that out of the way, these models are not playing the same game as the human contestants, in at least two major regards. First, and quite obviously, they have massive amounts of compute power, which is kind of like giving a human team a week instead of five hours. But the models that are co…

Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses… first, and quite obviously they have massive amounts of horsepower, which is kind of like giving a team of horses… many more horses. But also cars have an absolutely massive fuel capacity. Petrol is such an efficient store of chemical energy compared to hay and cars can store gallons of it. I…

Snark aside, I would expect a car partaking in a horse race to beat all of the horses. Not because it's a better horse, but because it's something else altogether.

Ergo, it's impressive with nuance. As the other commenter said.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#130

Post by 512 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #57

ICPC = The International Collegiate Programming Contest. These are college level programmers, not elite competitive programmers. Apparently Gemini solved one problem (running on who knows what kind of cluster) by burning 30 min of "thinking" time on it, and at a cost that Google have declined to provide. According to one prior competition paricipant, writing in the comments section of this ArsClasica coverage, each y…

The ICPC has plenty of elite competitive programmers. It's an activity that "peaks" in importance around college, and not many keep training a lot after participating.

Every year there are multiple "Legendary Grandmasters" in the competition. That's >3000 Elo in Codeforces. I'd estimate it takes a similar level of skill/effort as becoming a Chess Grandmaster.

And even those that aren't at that level are very competent at it. The average ICPC participant is likely "smarter" than the average MIT/Harvard CS student for some reasonable measure of "smarter".

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