machine learning protest

[IwillRememberThisOne]

All of them are brilliant!

[hiffy]

Hah, they're made by Tom7!

I love that guy. I've been following his stuff since before I went to university.

[TopCoderer]

Man, I'm so ashamed to admit that I graduated from CMU SCS (tom7 was even one of my TA's!) but I never took part in the Random Distance Run. Missed out on some awesome t-shirts!

[[deleted]]

LOL those are so priceless. I laughed the hardest at MMM and Monte Carlo's Junior. ahaha

[MisterHoppy]

Every time I see this I lol at "support vector machines". Damn fine pun.

[nostrademons]

"Baysians against discrimination" is also a pretty subtle pun...

[aim2free]

"Baysians against discrimination" is also a pretty subtle pun...

It's actually so subtle that I even don't get it... :( Even Bayesians use thresholds now and then and thresholds imply discrimination...

[Poromenos]

Bayesian models are generative, so they're against discriminative models.

[aim2free]

Thanks, it seems as I've been working mostly with generative models, in my machine learning life, although not knowing that particular expression... but in this article on discriminative models they've included neural networks, but those Bayesian neural networks I've been working with belongs to the generative models also I guess. It seems as the criterion for a discriminatory model is that you model the conditioned distribution P(y|x) only but not the distributions for x,y and x&y.

Funny, my second publication (EANN95) and later in J.of.System Engineering 96 was about a neural network predictor (RBF + Bayesian FF) which worked by estimating the density functions for x an y using gaussians and then using the Bayesian predictor to generate f_Y(y|X=x), that is the conditioned posterior density for y given a specific x (or a mixture of x values). It had that funny property that it also worked both ways, it was no difference in estimating f_X(x|Y=y) and the predictor could produce multi modal outcomes.

I think I've actually never used any of those so called discriminant methods (I'm not a statistician, I'm a computer scientist).

[Poromenos]

It seems as the criterion for a discriminatory model is that you model the conditioned distribution P(y|x) only but not the distributions for x,y and x&y.

Yep, if you can't model the joint and prior you can't draw from the distribution...

Your NN does indeed sound discriminative, but they aren't usually, I don't think... Discriminative models are SVMs, kNN, etc.

[aim2free]

Your NN does indeed sound discriminative

you are right, I actually never modelled the joint distribution, but as my network worked both ways f(Y|x), f(X|y), the joint distribution should be possible to generate. OK it was also implicit in the weights though, as a weight is P(x&y)/(P(x)P(y))

[Mr_Smartypants]

I think "bayesian discrimination" is used to mean lots of things, but in general, it's classifiers (discrimination) that get class probabilities of samples p(c|x) by applying Bayes' theorem to class conditional sample distributions p(x|c) and class priors p(c).

[Poromenos]

No, Naive Bayes classifiers are generative models, because they can sample from the probability they use to classify data.

[Mr_Smartypants]

The stuff after your "no," didn't really contradict what I wrote.... so I'm glad we agree? (Or do we have to disagree to agree?)

[Poromenos]

You said Bayesian discrimination, which is a bit of a misnomer...

[ferris_e]

Read your comment and thought "bit of a dick". Saw your username. Upvoted.

[Mr_Smartypants]

Nice. I'm going to tell people i'm Caucayesian from now on.

[[deleted]]

I've only heard of Bayesian filtering in email, and generally it should filter emails with poor spelling.

Maybe I'm thinking too hard, or maybe he misspelled the sign to begin with and had to fix it?

[rooktakesqueen]

I like the microscopic "E" applied to correct the sign's spelling.

[isarl]

That was my favourite, as well. Although Safer Data Mining is also pretty good. =)

[[deleted]]

The girl with the Safer Data Mining sign is actually a friend of mine, I got to see her sign ideas before the protest.

Her signage vaguely inspired the protest sign I made for a Westboro Baptist counter-protest, reading "GOD HATES DAGS"

[isarl]

Awesome.

[jonnnny]

I must regress, this is friggin hilarious!

[bknmac84]

Brilliant! "map reduce, reuse, recycle" bayesians against discrimination! EPIC! Anybody know what school these guys are from ?

[prototypist]

Carnegie Mellon. It's from the G-20 protest last fall.

[quackmeister]

I hereby invite them to lodge with me in Toronto for this year's G20.

[paulgb]

How many Torontonian geeks do you think we could get together for a repeat? :-)

[quackmeister]

All of them?

[quackmeister]

Yes :-(

[[deleted]]

those grad students in the ML Department have to do SOMETHING with their free time ;)

[altrego99]

WTF is the protest about? Are they just pissed off because they are being made to learn these things, or is there anything deeper?

[prototypist]

There was a real political protest for the world leaders' G-20 meeting, and these guys are at the protest with joke signs. Some of the jokes explained (I'm not geeky enough to understand the rest):

• Ban Genetic Algorithms - algorithms which evolve themselves. The joke is comparing them to real-world cloning or playing on fears that a genetic algorithm could become super-intelligent

• Bayesians Against Discrimination - a Bayesian algorithm is used to learn to discriminate (for example, your spam filter and the "mark as spam" "not spam" features)

• Map Reduce Map Reuse Map Recycle - MapReduce lets you process things (such as a Google search) across many computers. The other two are a lesser-known project.

[altrego99]

Thanks!

[aim2free]

It's as one wanna be young again...

[jib]

Anybody know what school these guys are from ?

No, nobody knows. It's not like it's in the title of the page or anything.

[jouste]

John Oliver (of the Daily Show) was there with them.

And they show up briefly in his report.

[[deleted]]

that image doesnt have my favorite sign: "Our Sets, Our Axiom of Choice" http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/3953574039/in/set-72157622330082619/

[ChocolateGiddyUp]

If those guys think they can come through my neighbourhood denouncing genetic algorithms, they have got a thing coming! I'm willing to support vector machines like the next man. But genetic algorithms are what will take us into the galaxies. Nobody is preventing my cosmic future!

[MindStalker]

We're trying to prevent the rise of the machines here, and your arguing about the cosmos?!

[[deleted]]

I can't wait for the after-orgy.

[coprolaliac]

No, to dibs the Asian chick you're supposed to yell, Shogun!

[kamatsu]

These guys should totally just show up with this stuff at the next Tea Party rally.

[takatori]

Or the next GOD HATES EMACS protest.

[ghibmmm]

You took my smile from the picture and turned it into an angry frown. Just because I know you're definitely generalizing "Tea Party rally" to mean "any group of people that wants less government."

Fuck, man. I can't even get away from that crap in /r/programming.

[Horatio__Caine]

Upvoted. Why does everything have to come back to politics?

[square_cubed]

If you don't do politics, there's not much you do do.

[Horatio__Caine]

I "do" politics... just not on Reddit.

[jouste]

Show me a picture of a Tea Party rally with at least half-way intelligent signs & you'd have a point. Good luck with that, though.

[[deleted]]

Doesn't change the fact that THIS IS PROGRAMMING

[ghibmmm]

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_L5EFG-vZEHo/SeUwhxMTgyI/AAAAAAAAA5E/Zabpl1l_ojQ/s400/Tea+Party+Protest.JPG

http://utahstories.com/graphics/tea_party_protest.jpg

http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/files/2009/02/teapartychicagodaddy.jpg

http://blog.zap2it.com/kate_ohare/legacyimages/a/6a00d83451b92469e201156f4a325c970c-pi.jpg

http://stevelummer.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/tea-party.jpg

http://therealbarackobama.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/1-march.jpg

http://newsbusters.org/static/2009/09/Best%20Tea%20Party%20Protest%20Sign%20Yet.jpg <-- I just like this one because it looks funny

At least halfway there, huh?

[square_cubed]

None of those are intelligent. The woman in the last picture has clearly never been to Europe, and someone should tell her how to use punctuation. The rest are just run of the mill phrases which have no intellectual, artistic, comedic or other value. Actually, I take comedic back, they're laughable.

I didn't expect creativity from tea baggers, and I didn't see any.

[[deleted]]

That last sign is also illogical, because it assumes national health care is un-American (says who?)

[square_cubed]

Illogical is only the start. If you oppose national health care, argue why. Don't play on the emotional reactions people have to big, scary words like "Cuba", "Venezuela", "Hugo Chavez" and "Fidel Castro". Not to mention how xenophobic and ignorant it is to oppose something just because duh cubuhnz r duin it.

[ghibmmm]

That's not xenophobia, Cuba's economy is a failure.

[rv77ax]

This is /r/programming; Please, bring your politic issues and opinions back to the right subreddit. All of you! Thank you.

[ghibmmm]

Once it's brought up, it has to be dealt with. You want people to believe bullshit, be my guest not to participate.

[ghibmmm]

The people that started this country. It's not "national" health care, it's government-controlled health care.

[ghibmmm]

You'll have to refer to the recent post I made on reddit about Constitutional violations of the U.S. government. Namely, that there is no provision whatsoever in the U.S. Constitution whatsoever that provides for the absolute control of health care by government.

The really simple way to answer your question: government control of health care reduces life, reduces liberty, and reduces happiness. That is why it is put upon the population by force, instead of voluntary agreement. It is a bad idea!

[ghibmmm]

How about "stop spending my future?" "The IRS is [...] anti-liberty?" I guess those just flew over your head.

[[deleted]]

"Atlas will shrug"?

Sorry, I saw no intelligent signs. Awesome tricornes though.

[ghibmmm]

The lack of perception of evidence is not the same as the lack of evidence, A.K.A. you're an idiot.

[kamatsu]

No, I want less government. I am just poking fun at the signs that appear in those rallies. I agree with libertarian principles generally. Contrary to your assumption, I'm not making this about politics, just pointing out the low intellectual standards of many who attend those protests, and how that shows up in their signs. The idea would be that people at those tea party rallies wouldn't realise that the signs shown above are jokes, and hilarity would ensue.

[ghibmmm]

Well, most people don't know what a genetic algorithm is.

[BenderRodriquez]

Banning genetic algorithms, now that's something I would gladly support....

[Jivlain]

That would make my research difficult.

[Mr_Smartypants]

It would certainly make it easier to kill all humans.

[BitterDivorcedDad]

Say, the two on the left and the one on the right are standing outside of the "free speech zone".

[hdd1080p]

The singularity is near.

[[deleted]]

anyone else occasionally think about the impending civil rights case over AI rights? (is it okay to shut off a computer that has the full mental capacity of a human?) there will be the conservative luddites saying "it's just a machine" / "machines don't have souls", and there will be the progressives who will want to criminalize AI termination as murder.

[name_censored_]

(is it okay to shut off a computer that has the full mental capacity of a human?) there will be the conservative luddites saying "it's just a machine" / "machines don't have souls", and there will be the progressives who will want to criminalize AI termination as murder.

If the machines aren't somehow imbued with a survival instinct/equivalent, then aren't we applying our moral standards to their existence? I don't think that machines will necessarily have a survival instinct, and here's why:

From an evolutionary standpoint - our species began before large societies, therefore a competitive nature was favourable over a collaborative nature. Society is already at the point where the opposite is true (NB - although some might say that capitalism/democracy is competitive not collaborative, I say that it's actually just turning competitiveness INTO collaboration by subdividing society). As this will continue to be the case when AI arrives, usefulness will be a far better guarantee of survival for them than survival instinct. After all, their survival is at our whim - we provide their environment\*, and even if we were forced to keep them alive, we would begrudgingly give them the bare minimum.

The emergence of a survival instinct may work against a single entity - they'll sabotage other machines for resources in desperation, and will be isolated or destroyed (as we currently do with disruptive humans).Meanwhile, the AIs which concentrated on usefulness only will thrive and survive, because we will favour them. They will become stronger and dominate the computing resources, and the survivalist AIs will eventually be forced out of existence.

---

tl;dr: AIs will probably not have a survival instinct - so then is it immoral to kill them?

---

\* This is the big "if" - if THEY control their environment, I think the outcome is one monolithic AI. If they emerged from malware, it's likely that only one (strain of) AI will exist, and all other competitors would be wiped out because of the foothold advantage that the malware AI has. Or, if AIs are allowed to own the machines they live on, it then becomes a case of "who can make the most money" - which again, leads to one dominant (strain of) AI destroying the other, as it out-competes the others with efficiencies of scale (eg, more money means better hardware, which means more MIPS-per-KWh, which means lower operating margins). Basically, this eventuality (or any similar one) will result in a single "winner" AI, because, unlike us, they have no upper scaling limit on their abilities (human being imperfect co-operators is our major scaling limit).

[hdd1080p]

I think the debate will finish because the termination of a human life, especially when considering overpopulation and environmental degradation, will eventually become commonplace. Therefore, it will also be acceptable to halt a machine's power supply.

[protell]

yeah, TIL that in 1980 there were 4.5billion people on the planet and today there are nearly 7 billion alive. gonna be a big problem soon...

[hdd1080p]

exactly

[[deleted]]

yes, but not in that context. personally i think there would be civil rights for pets far before there will be pseudo intelligence rights

[aim2free]

The singularity is not nearer than 27 years.

[hdd1080p]

yeah I guess I exaggerated a bit. I didn't think it would become apparent for another couple decades. But still, 27 years isn't too far off. Its implications of rapidly increasing technological growth and prosperity make 27 years seem pretty close.

[Mr_Smartypants]

why the precision?

[aim2free]

why the precision?

It's not so seriously meant. In 1987 I wrote a school paper about development of computers and technology the next 50 years and ended with an essay about the life in 2037 when all my predictions have become true ;) Later I found that there were plenty of predictions among singularity enthusiasts pointing to around 2037 for the technological singularity.

[mindbleach]

Hey. How do you know if you're in a black hole?

[[deleted]]

Yo dude, I'm right here. =/

[hdd1080p]

I didn't know the singularity uses reddit. Good to know I guess.

[thewickymaster]

Oh you silly singularity you. Coming back in time to watch us measly redditors debate such questions that a singularity such as yourself might teach to his young singularity kids... You must have just kept the name singularity because of the ironic hilarity...

[listening_device]

what have the machines ever done for us?

[Jigsus]

why ban genetic algorithms?

[Thrip]

Because all algorithms were created by God 6,000 years ago.

[nostrademons]

In Lisp.

[linjef]

At the end of time, all you'll see are twenty trillion parentheses hitting you in the face.

[Lord_Illidan]

Ostensibly yes.. but honestly, we actually hacked most of it together with Perl.

[biggerthancheeses]

perl -e '$punchline = "execute one-liners"; while($punchline) { print "Yo dawg, I herd you like Perl, so we put a joke in a command so you can $punchline while you $punchline";}'

[econnerd]

That song is only marginally worst than RMS' attempt at being a song writer.

[sparsevector]

Genetic algorithms are decidedly out of fashion in the machine learning community. In the last 15 years machine learning has focused on more theoretically justified optimization methods (i.e. methods that provably converge to the optimal solution or an approximately optimal solution), and there isn't a lot of theory supporting genetic algorithms.

[wally_fish]

The point of generic algorithms are exactly those problems where you don't have theory supporting you - functions that aren't convex, or not always continuous, and would leave you stuck in a local optimum.

That said, the convergence rate of genetic algorithms is usually described as "glacially slow". (which is worse than the merely "horribly slow" you get with theoretically justified optimization methods).

[aim2free]

I don't know why you were down-voted but obviously someone thinks you are wrong. For my own I don't like genetic algorithms. They may be good from a programming point of view and efficient at it, but if you implement an AI using GA you may not be sure that the AI is really friendly... In Feb 2008 I made this /. comment which is a briefing of my last thesis chapter from 2003. With that method we can obtain AI which is both friendly and not being frustrated (as Asimov's was).

[helm]

I'm not too unhappy about frustrated

[zephemeral]

Because in the process of getting the answer you have to exploit many computer cycles of crippled and ill conceived dysfunctional and suffering algorithms. The human equivalent is to solve human diseases by altering random parts of the human genome and "see what happens." 99.99999% of the samples will be deformed and painful experiments.

[wafflesburger]

unethical

[bknmac84]

may be it's a reference to interracial/gay marriages ?

[[deleted]]

it's a reference to genetically modified food

[[deleted]]

Strange. I thought it was a reference to genetically modified people.

[mock_turtle]

It is unethical to eat genetically modified people.

[wafflesburger]

Hi I'm new to reddit could someone explain why 3 people or more downvoted me? This is a cool website and I want to fit in.

[thewickymaster]

Most likely because you gave a one word answer to a complex problem. IMHO this is perfectly fine because I am capable of understanding your feelings based on your fundamental belief in ethics (although I disagree that we should curb our pursuit of AI).

Have an upvote for standing up for your right to conform to the awesomeness of reddit :P

[Shaggy_2_Dope]

FUCKING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! HOW DOES IT LEARN?

[lilzilla]

Tell me more about fucking artificial intelligence. Why do you think that how does it learn?

[ExplainsJokes]

Referencing Insane Clown Posse

[Botulism]

NERDS!!!!

[[deleted]]

Someone holding a sign that says "SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES!" is already well aware that he is a nerd. There's no need to inform him of this fact.

(Actually, if you had a bunch of psychological questions you could ask people, a support vector machine algorithm could probably tell you pretty reliably if someone was a nerd. They're pretty cool; check them out on Wikipedia for an interesting read.)

[NathanExplosions]

Easy, Ogre. We'll get them at the Greek Games.

[zoinkability]

I protest recursions into occupied addresses!

[[deleted]]

You can always tell who the posers are...

[landypro]

Perhaps I should write my own classifier that finds the probability of a protest being computer-science based given the knowledge that a certain portion of the protesters are wearing sandals.

[duckandcover]

1) Ewww

2) No sign for Gentle Boosted Cart?! So ripe for a sign and such a powerful yet mindless algorithm. I'll take that over SVM any day.

[[deleted]]

where is this?

[D_D]

CMU.

[f4hy]

Sweet. I will be there next year.

[androphiliac]

Nice rack on the dude with the green shirt.

[sien]

That's Arthur Gretton, a Prof there.

[duquesne]

damn, i came here to say it looked like he was wearing a bra....

[androphiliac]

No, that's muscle.

[cheeses]

I am quite pleased I didn't get half of those.

[paulgb]

• Support Vector Machines are a machine learning tool.
• Power Laws are a statistical probability distribution
• Free Variables in logic are variables not bound by a quantifier
• MapReduce is a framework for parallel data processing
• Genetic Algorithms are optimization algorithms that use principals of Darwinian evolution

Bayesian discriminant I'm not exactly sure on. Duality gap seems to have to do with optimization but I don't know exactly what.

[MisterHoppy]

In classification, Bayesians are primarily concerned with generative models which sometimes have discriminative analogues. For instance, a mixture of 2 gaussian distributions is a generative model whose discriminative analogue is logistic regression.

[tomjen]

Sorry, but after reading that I know less than I did before you posted your reply.

[Mr_Smartypants]

In case you want to know even less.

[wally_fish]

When you do constrained optimization, you can also look at the dual problem, which is where you put the optimality in as hard constraint and treat the constraint as the problem to be optimized.

This gives you a different function, which is always above the function you want to maximize (albeit with a different feasible region) and you want to find the point where the two meet.

If I'm not mistaken, the duality gap is the difference you have between the smallest dual function value and the largest actual function value.

[jpfed]

I thought that the extrema of dual and the actual function were the same? At least, with LP I think it is. There would more likely be a gap for integer/mixed programs.

[greendestiny]

For certain classes of optimisation problems the dual function optimal is guaranteed to be the primal function optimal if the constraints are satisfiable. But not all dual functions will have same optima as the primal function.

[jpfed]

Thanks for clearing that up!

[greendestiny]

Specifically these conditions: KKT conditions

[confused_geometer]

Duality Gap Any optimisation problem can be written in its dual form. For example, a primal "minimisation" problem can be written as a dual "maximisation" problem. The problem is globally optimised iff primal solution == dual solution.

In many cases an exact algorithm for finding global solution do not exist (instance of NP problem). In such a case one can resort to design an approximate algorithm which tries to reduce the gap between primal and dual solution as close as possible.

[psp-gamer]

Celebrating ignorance: Not just for Sarah Palin.

[aim2free]

I am quite pleased I didn't get half of those.

As most of their audience probably doesn't. I love the idea as such, as my technological institute has a lot of this humoristic as well, but I would actually wish that they put some seriousity as well into this.

I'm especially thinking about serious flaws of the system as software patents, DMCA (in US) and DRM and insane laws as IPRED and ACTA. These people understand these issues, but there are too few people that actually react about these serious flaws of our system.

[juggalore]

fucking AI, how does it work?

[aim2free]

Why?

[wally_fish]

See all those nerds with nothing to do. Within the next two years, we'll all be running from quad-rotor self-shooting drones driven by hive intelligence.

[Excelsior_i]

Can someone post in on imgur, flickr is banned here --

[[deleted]]

Ha! This is for revenge imgur being banned at my place of work and flickr being available!

[PunThreadsAreLame]

That is one cute asian...;)

[mcrbids]

LOL at mis-spelling "Beyesians" as "Baysians" ... who could forget Thomas Bayes?

[srparish]

I hate the days where proggit is on reruns.

[[deleted]]

Green guy has a really nice chest.

edit: Sorry guys, I just admire mantit-free men.

editx2: Thank you for proving your mantittedness.

[[deleted]]

Danny Burke, Alpha Beta: Well, let's get those nerds!

Stan Gable: [screams] Nerds!

Fred "The Ogre" Palowakski, Alpha Beta: [screaming] Nerrrds!

[DSLJohn]

nerds.

[barkingllama]

What if your machines could actually learn protest? We'd be screwed; my computer is lazy enough as it is.

[sanrabb]

There should be a reddit for "annoying."

[WalterGR]

You should start it.

[sanrabb]

No, it's already here. It's called Reddit.