AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time • Hacker News Board

Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time

#31

Post by joosters » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

Joker_vD wrote: post #4

I too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window. On a more serious note, Yandex has been using ML in his Meteum platform since about 2016, I think? and this summer they've incorporated the user reports into it too: one can open the Weather or Maps widget and click "It's actually raining here right now" or "Actually, it's not raining here right now" button. Apparen…

I too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window.

Years ago, I set up a simple website that screen-scraped the BBC's weather predictions, and compared them against the day's weather report to calculate a very crude and basic accuracy.

For the UK towns it monitors, a dumb prediction of "tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's" gives a 34% accuracy - which only falls to about 25% when predicting the weather for next week! Luckily, the proper weather forecasters do a bit better than this :)

https://weather.slimyhorror.com/

(Excuse the basic site, I set this up over 17 years ago, and with minimal tweaks it has been left to its own devices since then)

Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time

#32

Post by Gys » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #24

Gys wrote: post #22

In the Netherlands there is buienradar.nl which also uses radar images to predict rain fall accurately. Already for more then 10 years. Before an algorithm was called ‘AI’ ;-)

Did you read the paper? It makes clear that, yes this has been done for years and is nothing new as such, but this new approach gives much more accurate and higher resolution results.

I only read the article, sorry! Its just that at the time I was often amazed by the accuracy of the service (for timing, duration and rain intensity). But I guess there is always room for improvement.

Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time

#33

Post by scoopertrooper » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

Joker_vD wrote: post #29

scoopertrooper wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks around Hacker News are convinced that AI is just another hype-cycle. Yes, this paper is an incremental improvement over the state of the art of hand crafted algorithms. However, it should be viewed as an incremental step towards greater things! I'm sure DeepMind, the team that recently (basically) solved the protein folding problem, will deliver exciting advancements in the field of weather forecasting in…

The AI has been another hype-cycle for at least two times already. "AI winter" is a term from the seventies, and it re-emerged the second time in the late eighties. But maybe the third time the charm, who knows.

I think it's fair to say that we've moved forward leaps and bounds since the the 80s. There have been major advances in compute and AI methods since that era.

There's certainly much further to go and we may end up hitting another wall sooner than later, but AI is delivering tangible results today in ways that it never could in previous eras.

Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time

#34

Post by Joker_vD » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:58 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #31

Joker_vD wrote: post #4

I too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window. On a more serious note, Yandex has been using ML in his Meteum platform since about 2016, I think? and this summer they've incorporated the user reports into it too: one can open the Weather or Maps widget and click "It's actually raining here right now" or "Actually, it's not raining here right now" button. Apparen…

I too can predict if it will rain in two hours' time (somewhat reliably) by looking out of the window. Years ago, I set up a simple website that screen-scraped the BBC's weather predictions, and compared them against the day's weather report to calculate a very crude and basic accuracy. For the UK towns it monitors, a dumb prediction of "tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's" gives a 34% accuracy - which onl…

Have you tried comparing the weather on a date with the weather on the same date but one year earlier? I heard an anecdote that it's actually one of the most reliable ways to predict weather but I kinda doubt it... and I am too lazy to actually check whether it is.

Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time

#35

Post by Joker_vD » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 2:09 PM UTC

scoopertrooper wrote: post #33

Joker_vD wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI has been another hype-cycle for at least two times already. "AI winter" is a term from the seventies, and it re-emerged the second time in the late eighties. But maybe the third time the charm, who knows.

I think it's fair to say that we've moved forward leaps and bounds since the the 80s. There have been major advances in compute and AI methods since that era. There's certainly much further to go and we may end up hitting another wall sooner than later, but AI is delivering tangible results today in ways that it never could in previous eras.

This same argument was just as valid in 1970 (AI has never been done before at all) and in 1985 (they did actually improve it, and the hardware, drastically). Still, in both cases walls were hit and hype died. So, learning from this dataset, I would predict something similar.

In any case, the weather on a scale larger than 2 months is effectively can't be modelled because butterfly effect is real: there is just not enough raw data being collected, and it's not precise enough; and IIRC the required amount of data and floating-point precision for more or less accurate modelling grows exponentially wrt the time period being modelled.

Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time

#36

Post by scoopertrooper » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

Joker_vD wrote: post #35

scoopertrooper wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to say that we've moved forward leaps and bounds since the the 80s. There have been major advances in compute and AI methods since that era. There's certainly much further to go and we may end up hitting another wall sooner than later, but AI is delivering tangible results today in ways that it never could in previous eras.

This same argument was just as valid in 1970 (AI has never been done before at all) and in 1985 (they did actually improve it, and the hardware, drastically). Still, in both cases walls were hit and hype died. So, learning from this dataset , I would predict something similar. In any case, the weather on a scale larger than 2 months is effectively can't be modelled because butterfly effect is real: there is just not…

There's a difference though now, isn't there?

For instance, every modern smartphone today has AI inference accelerator in it. Not even the largest supercomputer in 1985 (or even 1995) had anything close to the AI capability of even a phone today. Some are even beaten out by watches.

Also, there were no practical applications of AI in 1985. There was a lot of speculation, but nothing came out of it because the technology just wasn't there yet.

Today computer vision, voice recognition, voice synthesis, driving assist mechanisms, face recognition, and many other fields have been advanced considerably through the use of AI technologies.

We have yet to even scratch the surface of what is possible with our current level of development.

Yes, we'll hit a wall soon enough, but we'll hit that wall having developed a range of useful products. The previous iterations were considered hype because nothing came out of them, but that can not be said for the current environment.

It's like saying there is a hype-cycle in cataract treatment because the development of method plateaued between babylonia and the age of reason.

Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time

#37

Post by ekianjo » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

spywaregorilla wrote: post #25

ekianjo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did not need Black box neural networks to do statistics before.

You don't need a black box neural network to do statistics now. But it might be a good tool nonetheless. And it might be much less of a black box than you imagine.

As far as i know the understanding of how multi layered neural networks actually work is a hot research topic.

Re: AI can predict if it will rain in two hours' time

#38

Post by spywaregorilla » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #37

spywaregorilla wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a black box neural network to do statistics now. But it might be a good tool nonetheless. And it might be much less of a black box than you imagine.

As far as i know the understanding of how multi layered neural networks actually work is a hot research topic.

It is, but in many cases its still pretty easy to figure out. It depends on how complicated the problem is. If it's truly an incomprehensible nonlinear cesspool, then its pretty much impossible. If it's secretly a linear regression with a few forks and inflection points, its easy.

The problems neural nets are used for do tend to fall into the former, but the techniques to unravel it are getting better.