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

141–150 of 197 posts

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

#141

Post by endorphone »

kaikai wrote: post #83
endorphone wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure so-called no-kill shelters don't outsource their killing by simply refusing less adoptable animals. And if this contest were advertised as "help us decide which animals to kill first" it probably wouldn't gain traction. This contest sounds ridiculous. It sounds like an attempt to get in on that AI gravy but do so with some sort of feel-good element. Only there is no feel good to it, and the basic prem…

> I'm pretty sure so-called no-kill shelters don't outsource their killing by simply refusing less adoptable animals. They do, though. That's how they are able to limit the number of animals they have at any given time.

They limit the number of animals they have at any given time by not taking in more when they are at capacity. This is very different from running a DNN model on every applicant and refusing to intake those that aren't adoptable enough, which is a preposterous concept.

And just to provide the full picture, most no-kill shelters of course have scenarios where they euthanize -- violent animals, sick animals, etc -- but they don't need a neural network to accomplish this.

This is all neither here nor there, as the contest had positively nothing to do with any of this. Instead they wanted to determine the most adoptable traits so they could adjust the less adoptable traits with the more adoptable traits: The poodle goes through the hair straightener and gets a blonde hair color treatment (clearly I am being satirical) to make it more like a lab, for instance.

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

#142

Post by lolc »

nnq wrote: post #112
laydn wrote: post #109

Slightly off topic: The nature of the competition is a bit worrying to me. They're essentially letting an algorithm decide which dogs have the best chance of adoption and which to euthanize, aren't they?

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…

The euthanization is already there. Machine learning can't justify what economy requires. The only thing machine learning promises here (and you're free to doubt the effect) is to improve adoption rates and thus reduce euthanization.

Of course this is highly problematic when applied to humans. But to be clear, some humans are already judged by models (transparent ones so far) in live and death decisions. That's how organ transplant decisions are taken. The candidates with the best prospects get the scarce organs. Similarily, when looking at populations, decisions that protect many are often taken in full knowledge of the danger to a few. Vaccination for example.

Resource optimization problems mix badly with absolute morals.

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by throwaway100773 »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #139
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…

> 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.

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

#146

Post by 7777fps »

paulgb wrote: post #17

For an HN audience, the "How Bestspotting cheated" post on Kaggle may be a better place to start: https://www.kaggle.com/bminixhofer/how-bestpetting-cheated

It's an odd way to cheat too, if they realised they had data from the validation set, couldn't they have over-trained a model with the validation set in the training data?

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

#147

Post by seieste »

bitL wrote: post #132
ribs wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying that Pleskov is a sociopath, but I’m beginning to see how sociopaths manage to make their way in the world without getting punished.

Imagine you have 100 sociopaths, all of them aiming for the top, all able to recognize each other in a crowd. Now you both compete and cooperate together to get to the top; the ones caught are written off, the uncaught ones sooner or later achieve the goal, even if only 10 out of 100 make it there. Some headhunters specifically try to identify high-performing sociopaths for top management positions.

> Some headhunters specifically try to identify high-performing sociopaths for top management positions.

[Citation needed]

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

#148

Post by C1sc0cat »

ribs wrote: post #89
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…

I’m not saying that Pleskov is a sociopath, but I’m beginning to see how sociopaths manage to make their way in the world without getting punished.

Its a down side of all these leetcode type systems where people game them for status.

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

#149

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #79
Thorentis wrote: post #33

> The goal was to create an algorithm that could predict how quickly a pet would be adopted based on its profile details, from its photo to its breed, sex, size, age, and whether it had been vaccinated or not. > These predictions would be used to optimize and tweak future critters' profiles so that they are adopted as soon as possible. Sorry but, how is this useful? You can't just change the age of an animal to make…

Its actually very useful. A limited number of parameters can be genuinely altered - a better photo can be taken, and vaccinations can be administered for example. Animal rehoming centres have to balance throughput with cost; reduced per pet costs mean that they are able to expand or support more complex cases. Whilst keeping a pet in a "space" and feeding it does cost, this cost can easily be significantly less than…

This sounds like it would generalise to healthcare decisions.
Post reply on HN