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“The top three performers of this phase hosted by Google-owned company Kaggle, will receive cash prizes of US$12,000, $8,000 and $5,000.” “incomparably more di

“The top three performers of this phase hosted by Google-owned company Kaggle, will receive cash prizes of US$12,000, $8,000 and $5,000.” “incomparably more difficult”

lima 8y ago
It's a competition, people aren't doing it for the prizes.
- mkagenius 8y ago
  Yes, but many certainly are doing it for the prizes.
  - danbruc 8y ago
    I am not sure, that sounds like a bad idea. Your chances of being one of the three wining teams are not terribly high and even if you manage to win, $12k for three months of work is not that much even if you work alone. Assuming there will be someone submitting a solution obtained using state of the art algorithms, it would probably be pretty naive to assume you have any significant chance of winning by just spending a couple of hours and throwing some generic machine learning algorithms at the problem. It immediately looked like a really interesting challenge to me, but after reading a bit about the state of the art it seems like three months is a pretty short time to come up with a meaningful result even if you could work on it fulltime. Many people already invested a lot of time in that problem and existing solutions are quite sophisticated and good. The material actually mentions that they expect that you will have to take into account things like adjacent detectors overlapping by a few pixels or how particles may light up several pixels if they hit the detector at very shallow angles and cross several pixels as they pass through the detector. The first thing someone probably considers is something like a Hough transformation and it turns out the creators of the challenge mention that in the material and submitted a solution based on this as a bench mark which achieves a score of about 20 %. If I read the related documents correctly, a meaningful result will require a score of at least about 90 % and the state of the art would probably be somewhere around 95 % to 98 %. The current leader is at 26.48 %, admittedly the challenge is only 5 days old. I am really curious where the scores will be at the end.
    - goldenkey 8y ago
      The US dollar is a very sought after commodity in 3rd world countries. 12k might be a crapshoot to you but 10 years of wages for a smart kid in another country
      - danbruc 8y ago
        If you are able to win this competition, then why wouldn't you get a job in that area and get a comparable amount of money every month instead of just once?
      - rbanffy 8y ago
        Not nearly desirable enough to motivate someone to invest the time and resources (which I assume would be non-trivial). 12k for 3 months of work amounts to 4k per month, which is a low salary for someone with the kind of skills this requires.
        beojan 8y ago
        Even $5k for three months is comparable to the low end of the range for PhD stipends, and $12k is well above the high end.
    - loceng 8y ago
      Well, the scenario I can imagine someone doing these kinds of competitions for prize money is say the super smart to uber rare Turing level thinkers; it wouldn't really be for the prize money because they'd likely enjoy doing it, though that might be enough incentive to temporarily redirect their attention. It's nice thank you prize money anyhow.
  - diehunde 8y ago
    no they don't
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    Some do it for the challenge - a lot of academic papers will be published about their efforts. I'm not sure I like this approach, however. AI is not pixie dust you can sprinkle over your hard problems and even if you are 100% sure your AI-based system matches perfectly your current systems, you simply can't guarantee it will match the cases you never tested (the never-seen-before data from never-done-before experiments). You'll still need to do the well understood process once you flagged the interesting data (and possibly threw away the sets mislabeled as uninteresting). A factor of 10, which is what's mentioned in the article, is what you expect to get with Moore's law in three or four years. With current off-the-shelf advances, I'd expect more than a 10-fold improvement in the next three years at the leading edge HPC world. Maybe CERN's problem is one that specialised compute units could solve better.

“The top three performers of this phase hosted by Google-owned company Kaggle, will receive cash prizes of US$12,000, $8,000 and $5,000.” “incomparably more difficult”

lima 8y ago

It's a competition, people aren't doing it for the prizes.

mkagenius 8y ago
Yes, but many certainly are doing it for the prizes.
- danbruc 8y ago
  I am not sure, that sounds like a bad idea. Your chances of being one of the three wining teams are not terribly high and even if you manage to win, $12k for three months of work is not that much even if you work alone. Assuming there will be someone submitting a solution obtained using state of the art algorithms, it would probably be pretty naive to assume you have any significant chance of winning by just spending a couple of hours and throwing some generic machine learning algorithms at the problem. It immediately looked like a really interesting challenge to me, but after reading a bit about the state of the art it seems like three months is a pretty short time to come up with a meaningful result even if you could work on it fulltime. Many people already invested a lot of time in that problem and existing solutions are quite sophisticated and good. The material actually mentions that they expect that you will have to take into account things like adjacent detectors overlapping by a few pixels or how particles may light up several pixels if they hit the detector at very shallow angles and cross several pixels as they pass through the detector. The first thing someone probably considers is something like a Hough transformation and it turns out the creators of the challenge mention that in the material and submitted a solution based on this as a bench mark which achieves a score of about 20 %. If I read the related documents correctly, a meaningful result will require a score of at least about 90 % and the state of the art would probably be somewhere around 95 % to 98 %. The current leader is at 26.48 %, admittedly the challenge is only 5 days old. I am really curious where the scores will be at the end.
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    The US dollar is a very sought after commodity in 3rd world countries. 12k might be a crapshoot to you but 10 years of wages for a smart kid in another country
    - danbruc 8y ago
      If you are able to win this competition, then why wouldn't you get a job in that area and get a comparable amount of money every month instead of just once?
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      Not nearly desirable enough to motivate someone to invest the time and resources (which I assume would be non-trivial). 12k for 3 months of work amounts to 4k per month, which is a low salary for someone with the kind of skills this requires.
      - beojan 8y ago
        Even $5k for three months is comparable to the low end of the range for PhD stipends, and $12k is well above the high end.
  - loceng 8y ago
    Well, the scenario I can imagine someone doing these kinds of competitions for prize money is say the super smart to uber rare Turing level thinkers; it wouldn't really be for the prize money because they'd likely enjoy doing it, though that might be enough incentive to temporarily redirect their attention. It's nice thank you prize money anyhow.
- diehunde 8y ago
  no they don't
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Some do it for the challenge - a lot of academic papers will be published about their efforts. I'm not sure I like this approach, however. AI is not pixie dust you can sprinkle over your hard problems and even if you are 100% sure your AI-based system matches perfectly your current systems, you simply can't guarantee it will match the cases you never tested (the never-seen-before data from never-done-before experiments). You'll still need to do the well understood process once you flagged the interesting data (and possibly threw away the sets mislabeled as uninteresting). A factor of 10, which is what's mentioned in the article, is what you expect to get with Moore's law in three or four years. With current off-the-shelf advances, I'd expect more than a 10-fold improvement in the next three years at the leading edge HPC world. Maybe CERN's problem is one that specialised compute units could solve better.