6 ms·

Given the "no-holds-barred, first-past-the-post" nature of this, the winner will be a group of people who split the test and each solved their part.

by skulk 5y ago

SteveDR 5y ago
Definitely. But how will they split the 154 questions? The prize pool is already big enough ($13k just a couple hours after the announcement and 5 days before the registration deadline) that 50 people could take it together and walk away with $260 each.
mattigames 5y ago
They can avoid that if you have to answer the questions in order one by one, without the possibility of going back to previous questions.
- gknoy 5y ago
  That would be hell. One of the best tactics I remember using on the paper one was skipping things and coming back later.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  Can't you just setup one sacrificial account to grab the question pool, pass it out for distribution to solve, gather it back up, then step through the question pool with the solution set? Essentially they just collect the questions and answer something knowing the run won't be a success. Unless these questions are sampled from a larger question pool, a single registration sacrifice for Intel gathering seems worth the cost. You can even distribute the loses to your pool after. Worst case scenario your group loses the admission fee + adminision fee/group size.
  - shmatt 5y ago
    This is the answer. * Sacrificial account crawls all the questions and puts them in queue * Team members pull questions one by one - and push answers back * Leader fills out answers as soon as the current one comes in (assuming you can't jump backwards/forwards) As long as the people are good enough at these kinds of tests, you'll win. It'll probably end up being a battle of 10+ teams that work like this
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      You will need some error checking though. There is no trade off between accuracy and time here. Someone will get a 1600 and then if your team misses one you lose. Maybe each queued question goes to 3 people and unless all agree it goes to everyone's queue for vote.
    - zucker42 5y ago
      How do you build such a system when there's no example of how the website will be formatted?
      - lbotos 5y ago
        You have humans do the actual work, where computers are just there for faster organization of human effort: an app with two queues: - those who input questions by copy and pasting them into an app or transcribing them, or speech to text -- apple offers all of these to iOS users in plain ol textboxes as far as I'm aware. - those who solve by reading from the app and submitting answers. Have N inputters getting all of the questions Have M solvers solving This builds your answer bank. Have someone submit from the answer bank with a text based search.
      - electroly 5y ago
        The "system" could be a shared Google Doc. I'm not sure you'd even want anything more complicated than that. The level of automation required here doesn't extend beyond copy-paste. The sacrificial account "crawl" is a human being with Google Docs open.
    - mysterydip 5y ago
      * leader runs away with the pot
    - jandrese 5y ago
      Maybe pulls a question and distributes it to the group, everyone answers, leader chooses the most popular answer. If you have to enter answers one at a time anyway there isn't as much opportunity to parallelize the task. You might get some win from the reading comprehension questions, but even then being 100% right is priority #1, as you can assume there will be multiple teams that get perfect scores.
kevmo 5y ago
I doubt it's going to actually be the SAT.
thomasahle 5y ago
Has anyone tried to solve SATs with AI yet?
zucker42 5y ago
Given that one question missed means you lose, you have to be very careful to choose a good team. I've gotten a perfect score on a standardized test (during high school) but while I know a lot of smart people, I know no one who has also gotten a perfect score. And it's hard to know how to quickly distribute the test since the online format hasn't been released.
- bhawks 5y ago
  Obviously it's unclear how much the MSAT will follow the real SAT. However after learning about the college admission scandal [1] I have been wondering how much my perception of the SAT being difficult is biased towards the experience of taking it in highschool. Ultimately it claims to estimate your performance as a college freshman so one would imagine that after a successful college and professional career most people would do moderately well on it. On the other hand the test itself is probably not a good indicator of college success so who knows. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_bribery_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_brib...

Given the "no-holds-barred, first-past-the-post" nature of this, the winner will be a group of people who split the test and each solved their part.

by skulk 5y ago

Given the "no-holds-barred, first-past-the-post" nature of this, the winner will be a group of people who split the test and each solved their part.

SteveDR 5y ago

Definitely. But how will they split the 154 questions? The prize pool is already big enough ($13k just a couple hours after the announcement and 5 days before the registration deadline) that 50 people could take it together and walk away with $260 each.

mattigames 5y ago

They can avoid that if you have to answer the questions in order one by one, without the possibility of going back to previous questions.

gknoy 5y ago
That would be hell. One of the best tactics I remember using on the paper one was skipping things and coming back later.
Frost1x 5y ago
Can't you just setup one sacrificial account to grab the question pool, pass it out for distribution to solve, gather it back up, then step through the question pool with the solution set? Essentially they just collect the questions and answer something knowing the run won't be a success. Unless these questions are sampled from a larger question pool, a single registration sacrifice for Intel gathering seems worth the cost. You can even distribute the loses to your pool after. Worst case scenario your group loses the admission fee + adminision fee/group size.
- shmatt 5y ago
  This is the answer. * Sacrificial account crawls all the questions and puts them in queue * Team members pull questions one by one - and push answers back * Leader fills out answers as soon as the current one comes in (assuming you can't jump backwards/forwards) As long as the people are good enough at these kinds of tests, you'll win. It'll probably end up being a battle of 10+ teams that work like this
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    You will need some error checking though. There is no trade off between accuracy and time here. Someone will get a 1600 and then if your team misses one you lose. Maybe each queued question goes to 3 people and unless all agree it goes to everyone's queue for vote.
  - zucker42 5y ago
    How do you build such a system when there's no example of how the website will be formatted?
    - lbotos 5y ago
      You have humans do the actual work, where computers are just there for faster organization of human effort: an app with two queues: - those who input questions by copy and pasting them into an app or transcribing them, or speech to text -- apple offers all of these to iOS users in plain ol textboxes as far as I'm aware. - those who solve by reading from the app and submitting answers. Have N inputters getting all of the questions Have M solvers solving This builds your answer bank. Have someone submit from the answer bank with a text based search.
    - electroly 5y ago
      The "system" could be a shared Google Doc. I'm not sure you'd even want anything more complicated than that. The level of automation required here doesn't extend beyond copy-paste. The sacrificial account "crawl" is a human being with Google Docs open.
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    * leader runs away with the pot
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Maybe pulls a question and distributes it to the group, everyone answers, leader chooses the most popular answer. If you have to enter answers one at a time anyway there isn't as much opportunity to parallelize the task. You might get some win from the reading comprehension questions, but even then being 100% right is priority #1, as you can assume there will be multiple teams that get perfect scores.

kevmo 5y ago

I doubt it's going to actually be the SAT.

thomasahle 5y ago

Has anyone tried to solve SATs with AI yet?

zucker42 5y ago

Given that one question missed means you lose, you have to be very careful to choose a good team. I've gotten a perfect score on a standardized test (during high school) but while I know a lot of smart people, I know no one who has also gotten a perfect score. And it's hard to know how to quickly distribute the test since the online format hasn't been released.

bhawks 5y ago
Obviously it's unclear how much the MSAT will follow the real SAT. However after learning about the college admission scandal [1] I have been wondering how much my perception of the SAT being difficult is biased towards the experience of taking it in highschool. Ultimately it claims to estimate your performance as a college freshman so one would imagine that after a successful college and professional career most people would do moderately well on it. On the other hand the test itself is probably not a good indicator of college success so who knows. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_bribery_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_brib...