Stealing Signs - Issue 01 (11/22/19)
Measuring AI, Failure, Gaming & Electronic Music, and Data Science @ MLB
Worth Reading
The Measure of Artificial Intelligence
“the hallmark of broad abilities (including general intelligence, as per II.1.2) is the power to adapt to change, acquire skills, and solve previously unseen problems – not skill itself, which is merely the crystallized output of the process of intelligence...To actually assess broad abilities, and thus make progress toward flexible AI and eventually general AI, it is imperative that we control for priors, experience, and generalization difficulty in our evaluation methods, in a rigorous and quantitative way.”
This is an absolute BEAST of a read but I think it’s the best thing I’ve read in 2019. Incredibly well-written. Took me the entire week to get through it, but it’s absolutely jam-packed with gems, two of my favorites (p 21-22):
human fitness capabilities as an analog for human cognition capabilities: “Both were, importantly, optimized for adaptability, and as a result they turn out to be applicable for a surprisingly greater range of tasks and environments beyond those that guided their evolution”
Humans easily solve NP-hard problems of small size but struggle mightily with those of very large size (i.e. in the Traveling Salesman Problem, finding the shortest possible distance traveled vs. the longest)
The one thing I couldn’t shake for the entirety of the paper (the authors hint at this a couple of times, too) is how outdated AI research and testing still is. Fascinating that it’s failed to progress for so long.
Failure an “Essential Prerequisite” for Success
“...based on an analysis of 776,721 grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health...analyzed 46 years’ worth of venture capital startup investments...and 170,350 terrorist attacks carried out between 1970 and 2017… The takeaway? ‘Every winner begins as a loser.’”
This seems obvious, but now there’s some data to back it up. I might start asking entrepreneur’s what their most recent failure was, when it occurred, what they learned from it, and how they’re applying what they learned to their current endeavor. It could reveal their motivations or “super power,” and, as the article suggests, may indicate the likelihood of success of their company.
The Future of Gaming in Electronic Music
“the act of streaming music is actually quite an isolated, individualised and utilitarian experience from the listener’s perspective, with few social elements like live chat or comments enabled on the dominant platforms. Both artists and fans looking for a deeper connection are forced to cultivate it elsewhere.”
I actually think this is a great playbook for sports (Madden, 2K) games to regain relevance with the millennial generation and below. This feels like a more natural progression than the relationship between non-sports games and electronic music mentioned in the article given the sports and music worlds are virtually interconnected.
Off-the-Field Data Science at MLB
“Using a network analysis, we quantify the relationships (i.e., degree centrality and clustering coefficient) between the different Clubs that a fan is watching play the game. This analysis allows us to label each of our fans as either a Rookie (a new or casual fan), Team (mostly interested in a single Club), or Veteran (interested in many Clubs) fan, and using these different segments, we can craft better, more personalized experiences for them.”
I wish the writers of this blog would post more often. It’s hard to describe how much I love it. We might be able to learn quite a bit from the MLB’s work about what large organizations care about when it comes to customer engagement, especially with numerous and diverse data sources. Can you imagine the volume and quality of data they’d be able to collect if stadiums had even half-functioning wi-fi?? It’d likely encourage even more smartphone usage at baseball games than the already significant levels (from what the Gen Z folks have told me) which means more dataaaaaaaaaa.
Update: “The connectivity congestion crunch at major sporting events could soon be alleviated thanks to a reallocated spectrum of bandwidth. Back in 2015, the FCC reassigned 150 megahertz of bandwidth that had been reserved exclusively for military use but now can be used commercially.” (link). Well, there you go.
Internet Crowds and Personal Space
“The more we care about personal space, the more of a burden it becomes. We strain under the effort of maintaining and protecting that perimeter. It’s a self-inflicted strain that constricts and scares us. The larger the distance around us we seek to protect, the greater the cost, and the more effort and paranoia it demands of us continuously”
A brilliant piece contextualizing the behavior of online crowds. I had a real “aha” moment while reading.
<stuff> Weekly!
LOL Weekly
lol
Funding Weekly
“the concept that customers would “crowdfund” a cow from a reputable, independent farm or ranch by banding together to purchase cuts of meat. When a whole cow was sold, it was ‘tipped.’”
I mean...come on...this is awesome. Yet another boomer activity revolutionized by technology.
Baseball Weekly
This is one of my all-time favorite videos and is super under the radar. A-Rod and Ken Griffey Jr. (in their primes) lost an impromptu HR Derby to a no-name Single-A player by the name of…David Ortiz.
Side note: I think you’ll be surprised with both the volume and relevance of baseball-related content year-round. For example: Bernie Sanders is weighing in on the MLB’s plan to cut 42 Minor League teams (link). I’m excited about this section of the post!
Chart Weekly
Nothing terribly surprising here imo. I’d wager the position of the NBA reflects the breakdown of most major metro areas. Also - anyone know what happened with Volkswagen? Quite a significant shift.
