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So far Deep Learning has made this Xkcd obsolete: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ Check whether a photo is of a bird.
by jakozaur 9y ago
So far Deep Learning has made this Xkcd obsolete:
https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
Check whether a photo is of a bird.
- denzil_correa 9y agoIt DID take a research team and ~ 5 years to get there? :)
- seren 9y agoInteresting, it shows how things can move quicker than expected, even when judged by enlightened people. Is there a way to know the date (1425) was released ?
- spatulan 9y ago24th September 2014
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoProgrammers often have Scotty syndrome and pad their time estimates to look like geniuses when they solve ahead of schedule.
- afarrell 9y ago> to look like geniuses when they solve ahead of schedule No, it is because estimating software tasks is difficult, the penalty for underestimating is that people think you are dishonest/flakey, and there isn't anywhere to get an education in how to do it well. The default advice given to junior engineers is therefore: "take your intuition and triple it." I hate that this is the state of the industry. My interactions around estimation over the past 5 years since uni have literally made me feel nauseated and near fainting on multiple occasions. I would love for Joel or Klamezius or Uncle Bob or someone else to fix it and produce a good course on how to create estimates.
- UK-AL 9y agoThere isn't a way. It's an issue that blights everyone in the industry. Probably the best your going get is the book "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art " Even applying those techniques you get it wrong. Most experienced software companies have adopted agile, and accept reductions in scope to meet deadlines as something that happens.
- bragh 9y agoAgreed, agile seems the only way, but does indeed require experienced managers. A lecturer once pointed out that business/normal people would always expect some kind of point estimate, they are never satisfied with some kind of distribution or interval. Personally, I would say that this is even more sad than that: the point estimates are always taken at the extreme values, which ever suits the person wanting the estimate more, never the average value. Of course, all this leads to bad blood between techies and business side: how long will it take? -> probably about 3 weeks, but this requires using a library we haven't used before, so in the worst case even 2 months -> what? so long? get it done in 4 days, this is required the next week -> no, that's not really possible -> make it happen -> it happens and it either sucks when it's delivered at all, so the deadline gets extended anyway to iron out all the bugs or it causes lots of problems in the future.
- seren 9y agoFor very long projects, I have seen much delay because of feature creep. "OK you have implemented it as requested, but finally the customer does not like it, it needs to be slightly different. Can you do it quickly?" Sometimes it is easy to adapt, sometimes next to impossible.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Beltiras 9y agoFirst copy in Waybackmachine is Oct. 2. 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20141101000000*/https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://web.archive.org/web/20141101000000*/https://xkcd.com...
- efaref 9y agoBy the looks of http://explainxkcd.com/1425 http://explainxkcd.com/1425 it was September 2014.
- Ended 9y ago24 Sep 2014 (hover over the title in https://xkcd.com/archive/ https://xkcd.com/archive/). So, less than 5 years ago!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- josefx 9y agoOr when you allow for hilarious false positives/negatives. Sometimes birds are birds, sometimes they are cats and cats are birds, sometimes they are dogs. Everything is possible with the right training set and machine learning.
- emiliobumachar 9y agoThere's an army of Machine Learning researches out there. Arguably a single team would have taken much longer, even on a narrow task.
- nyamhap 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239401
- simias 9y agoCan a computer algorithm reach a human-level of skill in identifying birds in a photo in all situations? That sounds like a very hard problem indeed. For instance could an algorithm conclusively identify the birds in all of these pictures without having too many false positives? https://ak3.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/6087611/thumb/1.jpg https://ak3.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/6087611/thumb/1.jp... http://www.hippoquotes.com/img/impact-of-nature-quotes-in-frankenstein/stock-footage-video-of-pelican-bird-sitting-on-a-ocean-post-and-a-sailboat-crossing-in-the-distance-port-isabel.jpg http://www.hippoquotes.com/img/impact-of-nature-quotes-in-fr... http://www.birdsasart.com/baacom/wp-content/gallery/cache/1711__800x800_dovekie-flock-two-glaciers-in-the-distance-_w3c7709-svalbard-norway_0.jpg http://www.birdsasart.com/baacom/wp-content/gallery/cache/17... https://vztravels.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/img_1390.jpg https://vztravels.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/img_1390.jpg http://www.zastavki.com/pictures/1920x1200/2011/Animals_Birds_A_bird_in_flight_032727_.jpg http://www.zastavki.com/pictures/1920x1200/2011/Animals_Bird... This is not a rhetorical question by the way, I genuinely don't know the state of the art in this field. If it's indeed possible to do that today I'll be extremely impressed.
- julius 9y agoDetection accuracy is fine. We are actually at a point where NNs can make photos :) Convert string:"this small bird has a pink breast and crown, and black primaries and secondaries." into a photo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAbhypxs1qQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAbhypxs1qQ
- simias 9y agoThat's impressive, but I'll point out that the bird photos in this video are all clean, well focused close ups, that's probably easier to process than random pictures. If you wanted a general algorithm working on non-curated data (like tagging facebook photos for instance) I'm sure it would be significantly harder.
- nl 9y agoCheck out the (deliberately blurry) examples in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05393.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.05393.pdf where it can distinguish between blurred, low resolution pictures of different types of crows. It's only ~50% accuracy, but the photos are terrible. Much worse than Facebook pics. OTOH, this is classification into hundreds of classes, not millions like in the case of FB face recognition. (Although of course that can use the connectivity graph as a filter on that too).
- nyamhap 9y agoThere was a previous discussion about this nearly 2 years ago on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10239401
- randomsearch 9y agoOthers have pointed out that this problem has not been solved in the general case. More importantly, the progress that has been made in recent years actually builds very heavily on work since the early 1990s, so not only is it not complete, what has been achieved took a great deal longer than 5 years.
- pixl97 9y agoWell, because we had to invent the massively parallel GPU in between those times. Essentially work that would take an entire supercomputer cluster in the 90s can be done on my desktop with 4 high end GPUs stuck in it. Now that we are in the range of having the correct hardware the whole "it's taking decades issue" will go away.
- randomsearch 9y agoGPGPU was definitely part of the success of recent years, but there was also a lot of experimentation and hard work carried out e.g. on CNN designs. Lots of trial and error. That took a lot of time. There have been fundamental changes in the structure and training of NNs that have helped bring the step-change in success.
- randomsearch 9y agoOthers have pointed out that this problem has not been solved in the general case. More importantly, the progress that has been made in recent years actually builds very heavily on work since the early 1990s, so not only is it not complete, what has been achieved took a great deal longer than 5 years.