• Olddog (unregistered)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    Not wanting to throw away a several hundred thousand dollar investment, the CTO decided to put the monstrous neural network to use doing something else: prose. The developers spent a few hours re-training it to work from a dataset of phrases and output actual sentences instead of tokenized log lines.

    Yup.  I can see it on the horizon... Extreme Make-Over, Nueral Network Edition.

  • (cs)

    I think this prose machine wrote Lindsay Lohan's e-mail about Robert Altman everyone's talking about.

  • Rob (unregistered)

    Well ... if that last bit is true, at least the CTO had a sense of humour about it.  That little story there is actually kind of amusing, in a sick way...

  • PseudoNoise (unregistered) in reply to Rob

    Yeah, the new CTO sounds like quite a guy, to:

    A) Recognize how wrong it was

    B) Want to figure out what the hell somebody was thinking to do something so wrong

    C) Listen to the actual explanation and come down on the side of the angels

    A rare breed.  It's not clear to me whether it was the CTO or the OP's idea to hook the net into a prose-bot and display it in the company newsletter, but that's brillant.

    Whenever I get stuck doing a dumb job, or forced to do a job a dumb way, one phrase gets me into the office in the morning: "I get paid the same either way."
     

  • (cs)

    Quite simply.... Wow


    Thats one of the best WTFs ever

  • yazow (unregistered) in reply to osp70

    I have had someone ask me to implement a neural network for them, they were a business person. I told them,"No, that is not an efficient way to solve this problem, it can be done much faster in traditional ways, and the problem isn't even in the domain of neural networks." Then I had to explain what I meant. "Neural network" to him meant: "processing information like a human". So it isn't surprising these managers wanted a neural network, the computers were going to take over a human role and humans use neurons.

     The guy I (most likely) will be working for is now somewhat convinced that simple sql queries will do exactly what he wants (along with some imperitive logic). The selling point though was it would only take one server instead of multiple ($$$$). Always mention $$$ when someone wants you to over engineer something so they can use a buzz word (in this case "neuro network").

     

  • (cs) in reply to dave's not here

    This is a great WTF! Thank you Alex! (Almost makes up for the mysterious disappearance of the CSOD.)

    I think the Real WTF is that they actually got the neural network approach to work at all. It sounds like completely the wrong tool from the job. Whaddya know, it *is* possible to screw in a screw with a sledgehammer sometimes.

  • (cs) in reply to mbvlist
    mbvlist:

    Years later, when things have gotten really messed up, they sued him for doing B. Proof was not the issue: all decisions and such were well documented. He did B, and B went wrong, so sue this guy. And they won 

    That is the biggest WTF for this court I know of, and something all advisors in the Netherlands should know. Unfortunately, I don't think they do...



    Well, I'm not in the Netherlands, and I didn't know that. Now I do, I never will be. Thanks...

  • (cs) in reply to mrprogguy
    mrprogguy:

    Good guess, but no quack for you.  It's Kipling.



    More a pastiche than a parody, wouldn't you say?

    For the record, I'd just like to comment on the similarity between the machine generated prose and the first paragraph of one of James Joyce's works.

    ...Ok, I'm done.

  • vomjom (unregistered) in reply to Cookie

    Sorry, but actually they are pretty similar.

    In fact, with the sigmoid kernel, SVMs can mimic a two-layer, feedforward neural network.

    They both follow a risk minimization principal.  Only SVMs minimize structural risk while neural networks minimize empirical risk.
     

  • mouseover (unregistered) in reply to dave's not here

    "We need an AI solution to stay competitive."

    "We need a .NET solution to stay competitive."

     "We need a Web 2.0 solution to stay competitive."

    "We need a plastic bag to hold our personal items while living on the street."

  • (cs) in reply to Cookie
    Anonymous:

    support vector machines, which are similar to neural networks

    Similar ?

    Oh, you mean perhaps that they are both about AI... 


    I guess SVM is AI in the sense that classification is an AI problem. I never got the warm gooey AI feeling that I got with Neural Networks or genetic algorithms though, only a horrible headache from trying to figure out the math. 

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

     No Quack.

     

    There's your problem. It's out of quack.

  • brindy (unregistered) in reply to PseudoNoise
    Anonymous:

    Yeah, the new CTO sounds like quite a guy, to:

    A) Recognize how wrong it was

    B) Want to figure out what the hell somebody was thinking to do something so wrong

    C) Listen to the actual explanation and come down on the side of the angels

    A rare breed. ... snipped ...

     it's a fairly typical management strategy for a new manager to come in and just do something radical, e.g. change processes, restructure the company, or sack people.  it's their way of justifying their existence and pay-check.
     

  • Anonymous 2 (unregistered) in reply to vomjom
    Anonymous:

    Sorry, but actually they are pretty similar.

    In fact, with the sigmoid kernel, SVMs can mimic a two-layer, feedforward neural network.

    They both follow a risk minimization principal.  Only SVMs minimize structural risk while neural networks minimize empirical risk.
     

    Also, SVMs with Gaussian kernels are functionally equivalent to radial basis function networks.  And linear kernel SVMs are functionally equivalent to perceptrons.  By functionally equivalent I mean they are the same ignoring the methods you use to optimize their parameters.  They are definitely similar.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous 2

    wow neural network wtf!!! this means i can plug my own neural network that i made last semester!

    ok, so it was already someone elses idea, but who cares, i got to write teh codes.

    anyway, this project was to create an evolutionary algorithm which would evolve checker playing AIs which had neural network backends, pit them against eachother and prune the loosers. 

    the best network was evolved for 4 days, at 4 ply search depth. the result is a better evaluator then i could write which only uses 4 ply search depth.

     
    craplet linkage:

    http://www.absoluteabandon.com/mk/NeuralNetCheckerAI/
     

  • Excedrin (unregistered) in reply to petvirus

    There's a book based on this idea called Blondie24

  • (cs) in reply to mbvlist
    mbvlist:

    Years later, when things have gotten really messed up, they sued him for doing B. Proof was not the issue: all decisions and such were well documented. He did B, and B went wrong, so sue this guy. And they won 

    I believe Napoleon once said something to the effect of: "If an officer receives orders that he knows will lead to disaster on the battlefield, he should resign his position rather than follow said orders."

    In other words, the fact that "you're just doing what you're paid for" doesn't make you less responsible of your actions.

  • Nick (unregistered)

    Hilarious story. That prose piece reminds me of something the HAL 9000 might have chucked up at the end of "his" run.

  • (cs)

    There's an automatic academic article generator and it really worked:

    http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

  • John V (unregistered)

    Yeah, so roses are red
    I made up the rest
    If you got some big fucking secret
    Then why don't you sing me something?
    I'm in the midst of a trauma
    Leave a message, I'll call you back
    Leave it by the pig
    Some people should die
    That's just unconscious knowledge
    Because, because the bigger you get
    The wider you're spread
    You gotta depend on me
    Now your vision is dead
    The more your dream is dead
    Visions...
    It gets sucked from my eye
    Like an eagle's claw...

     

    Holy crap, the neural net's evolved into Perry Farrell

  • (cs)

    That's my favorite WTF ever! If only there was some way to subscribe to the newsletter....

  • Teltariat (unregistered) in reply to bob the dingo
    bob the dingo:
    Volmarias:
    Anonymous:

     I'm still not sure why they trained the system to spew forth prose...



    Well, the internet is made for two things: Communication, and Porn.

    As a government workplace, Porn is not allowed. Therefor, the only thing left is Communication.

    Or, to put it more succinctly, "Prose Before Hos"

     

    i do believe this is the reply of the day... 

    Truth++.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous 2

    One more note about SVMs: only hard-limit linear SVMs are identical to perceptrons. And the big difference with neural networks (the structural vs. empirical risk reduction) is a great difference when your data is sparse (wrt the number of dimensions). SVMs have a much smaller chance of overfitting in that case.

     

    That said, I can hardly believe the story. The guy implemented a NN to parse data per node and it still required that much training?

  • Sebastiaan (unregistered) in reply to gwenhwyfaer
    gwenhwyfaer:
    mbvlist:

    Years later, when things have gotten really messed up, they sued him for doing B. Proof was not the issue: all decisions and such were well documented. He did B, and B went wrong, so sue this guy. And they won 

    That is the biggest WTF for this court I know of, and something all advisors in the Netherlands should know. Unfortunately, I don't think they do...



    Well, I'm not in the Netherlands, and I didn't know that. Now I do, I never will be.

     

    At face value, this strikes me as very unlikely. A lot of info surrounding that case must have gotten lost in translation as it made its way onto this message board.

    @mbvlist: can you post the specifics, i.e. when was this tried in court and who were the parties involved? Or maybe a newspaper article or somesuch?

  • horia314 (unregistered)

    Daisy ... Daisy ... daisyyyyyy

  • Niklas (unregistered) in reply to werdan
    werdan:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

     No Quack.

     

    There's your problem. It's out of quack.



    SIGEOQ

    captcha = error (yeah, it is!)
  • (cs) in reply to dave's not here

    Anonymous:
    Something is NQR about this scenario. It's very easy to paint this as a management WTF, but more likely someone in management wanted this guy or project for some other agenda. It's possible they expected to apply this project to some other area outside their immediate responsibility, but had to use this scenario in order to justify the cost. I can just imagine some manager thinking they can piggyback their career on some 'breakthrough' technology.

    Either that or M.A. is a really bad communicator.

    I wouldn't agree with that last line.  I've been in a similar situation soooo many times.  Technically clueless boss reads IT trade magazines in order to look smart or even to honestly look for solutions to his business issues, but doesn't quite understand it.  Asks me to implement such and such - usually swatting flies with a sledgehammer scenarios.  A very few good bosses will actually listen to me and accept my professional judgement if I offer a more appropriate solution.  The rest, well it usually goes like this:

    what they hear me saying:   "blah blah widget blah blah solution blah blah blah blah never work blah blah..."

    their conclusion:  not a team player, too negative, shut up and implement it anyway

    You could argue that I'm a bad communicator also, but I strive to be able to reduce the tech-talk to layman's language.  It seems to work for most of the management teams I've worked for.  However, I did have one boss once who - no matter what approach I used - felt that I was just condescending to her.  I always felt that it had something to do with her being a woman, but I could never understand why she would be intimidated by me - another woman! 

  • (cs) in reply to werdan
    werdan:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

     No Quack.

     

    There's your problem. It's out of quack.

    +++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR +++

     

  • (cs) in reply to gwenhwyfaer
    gwenhwyfaer:
    mbvlist:

    Years later, when things have gotten really messed up, they sued him for doing B. Proof was not the issue: all decisions and such were well documented. He did B, and B went wrong, so sue this guy. And they won 

    That is the biggest WTF for this court I know of, and something all advisors in the Netherlands should know. Unfortunately, I don't think they do...



    Well, I'm not in the Netherlands, and I didn't know that. Now I do, I never will be. Thanks...

     You're welcome. But every nation has it's reasons not to go there. I have my reasons to not go to the USA, mainly because the scentence "land of the free" is getting more and more incorrect. As a foreigner I can be thrown into jail, and be kept there indefinetly, without any reason. Now that's a WTF ;)

  • (cs) in reply to Sebastiaan
    Anonymous:
    gwenhwyfaer:


    Well, I'm not in the Netherlands, and I didn't know that. Now I do, I never will be.

     

    At face value, this strikes me as very unlikely. A lot of info surrounding that case must have gotten lost in translation as it made its way onto this message board.

    @mbvlist: can you post the specifics, i.e. when was this tried in court and who were the parties involved? Or maybe a newspaper article or somesuch?

    I haven't got a clue. My father heard of this story, and said it was about 25 years ago. Before the digital age, so it probably isn't on the net. I can't even help you on the specific details like names and such. And by the way: if you can't read Dutch, you probably wouldn't even be able to read the information I can find, and if you can: google is your friend ;)

    As far as I can see, nothing is lost in translation. I asked some questions to my dad, because I just couldn't believe it. It was an advisor implementing the wrong thing, on specific demands of the customer, and he got sued for that.

  • joadsfoji (unregistered) in reply to osp70

    osp70:
    our tax dollars at work.

    Anarchy is better than no government at all.

    Do you happen to be in the market for some real estate? Because I've got a house in beautiful downtown Mogadishu that I think you'd like.
     

  • Darmok (unregistered)

    Shaka, when the walls fell.

  • Nick (unregistered)

    Someone should take the prose generator and make a web app out of it. I would love to rattle with dove whenever go is to the fountain anytime the dove drop something.

    NO QUACK!

     

    captcha: pizza

    go is not pizza. delivery goat jump cat. bark no goat in lime.

  • mav (unregistered) in reply to Vector

    Vector:
    Well, I guess the neural network had it's prose and cons.

     

     

    Good sir, you are a word smith of the highest caliber.  A rousing pun.  I laughed, I cried, it moved me.

  • Frank (unregistered)
    WhatTheManagement?!

    M.A. Shoud have gone the Oz way and create a neural network for the original scarecrow. erm.. management I mean. ;)

    Greetings,
    /Frank.
  • Lepton (unregistered) in reply to Dan

    My site uses neural network techniques to learn what lind of Web articles you'll be interested in. A net of thousands of topics is weighted according to your ratings of a few articles, this makes an interest profile on you. Incoming articles (RSS feeds) are scanned to weight how relevant each topic is to it, with this info and your profile, it predicts your level of interest. If you correct its prediction (by moving a slider) this feedback propagates back through the net of topics, causing it to learn more of what you like.


    The result is sort of a learning newspaper, whose front page morphs according to your tastes.

    http://www.myallo.com

  • Roberto (unregistered)

    The true WTF is that this site doesn't update during the weekend. Looks like we're stuck here on a 9-5 mentality only seen in the worst of companies. Boo!

    Captcha: error. Hell yeah!

  • (cs) in reply to Darmok

    Anonymous:
    Shaka, when the walls fell.

    Temba, his arms wide.

    I laughed, I cried, two thumbs up. Best WTF in awhile. I want that newsletter too.

  • Lord Crc (unregistered) in reply to Akaji
    Anonymous:

    I'm a second year CS major at a private university in Minnesota, and our professor had an absolutely great idea for a project - a random poetry generator.  Instead of randomly stringing together words, however, the generator could only put words together that appeared together in the 'original' text (a poem written by a famous author was put into a .txt file, and the program would analyze it).  I've gotten some pretty similar results to what that NN got...

    Sounds like the Postmodernism Essay Generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo

    Excellent stuff...

    Here's a sample:

    Discourses of Paradigm: Foucaultist power relations and capitalism
    Henry Z. Reicher
    Department of Literature, University of Oregon
    1. Spelling and Sontagist camp

    If one examines subdialectic materialism, one is faced with a choice: either accept capitalism or conclude that narrativity is used to reinforce capitalism. However, Lacan’s critique of Foucaultist power relations holds that the goal of the participant is social comment. Derrida uses the term ‘cultural neopatriarchialist theory’ to denote the role of the artist as poet.

    It could be said that the meaninglessness, and thus the fatal flaw, of capitalism prevalent in Spelling’s Robin’s Hoods emerges again in The Heights, although in a more mythopoetical sense. The subject is interpolated into a Foucaultist power relations that includes culture as a whole.
    ...
     Excellent stuff indeed... 

     

  • rsl (unregistered) in reply to Lord Crc

    Sounds like the Kant Generator, a mac OS 9 app. ooo, google tells me there is a python version available online: http://bert.debruijn.be/kgp/

     

  • Asbjørn (unregistered)

    "The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig  disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack."

     

    Ahh... so that's the guys that have been sending me spam the last few years...


     

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Asbjørn

    If you think machine generated poetry is bad, you sould see TinyMCE generated code. 

     Example:

    <p>Nice to see an AI related wtf for once. I am sure there must be more of 'em lying around...&nbsp;</p><p>
    </p><blockquote><div><img src="http://thedailywtf.com/Themes/default/images/icon-quote.gif">
    <strong>Anonymous:</strong></div><div><p>&nbsp;I'm still not sure why they trained the system to spew forth
     <em>prose...</em></p><p></p></div></blockquote>

     This is the Real WTF!

     

  • (cs)

    Great...now everyone in the office is looking at me and asking why I am giggling to myself...

  • (cs)

    This is more coherent than most counterstrike players.

    No hax. 

  • WTF readers == WTF (unregistered) in reply to Brad
    Anonymous:

    Please, please, please, please can I have more prose?  Seriously, I would love to get that newsletter.  Even just an bi-weekly email.
     

     

    You should download MegaHAL then... Its a system that is designed to output this kind of crap, not only that, but you can have conversations with it 

  • (cs) in reply to PseudoNoise

    Am I alone (or mayhaps incredibly naive/stoopid) in thinking they just needed to add another field to that '3 field table' indicating what format the 'raw data' was in?

    Surely the system inserting this data can make that determination.

  • (cs) in reply to ha ha

    Anonymous:
    It took three years to fire them?

    I was surprised as well.  They usually hang around for at least five.

  • (cs) in reply to ha ha

    Anonymous:
    It took three years to fire them?

    I was surprised as well.  They usually hang around for at least five.

  • noname (unregistered) in reply to mbvlist

    felix:

    I believe Napoleon once said something to the effect of: "If an officer receives orders that he knows will lead to disaster on the battlefield, he should resign his position rather than follow said orders."

    In other words, the fact that "you're just doing what you're paid for" doesn't make you less responsible of your actions.

     Which he probably got from Sun Tzu, which makes it no less true. However, we aint talking about an officer in the field. We're talking about a contractor doing what he is told. You might argue about his ethical duties, however, if I as a customer want an upside down pyramid and I am willing to pay for it.... Liability in cases like this depends on who gets hurt. Still I don't quite believe it (see below).
     

    mbvlist:
    Anonymous:
    gwenhwyfaer:

    Well, I'm not in the Netherlands, and I didn't know that. Now I do, I never will be.

     
    At face value, this strikes me as very unlikely. A lot of info surrounding that case must have gotten lost in translation as it made its way onto this message board.

    @mbvlist: can you post the specifics, i.e. when was this tried in court and who were the parties involved? Or maybe a newspaper article or somesuch?

    I haven't got a clue. My father heard of this story, and said it was about 25 years ago. Before the digital age, so it probably isn't on the net. I can't even help you on the specific details like names and such. And by the way: if you can't read Dutch, you probably wouldn't even be able to read the information I can find, and if you can: google is your friend ;)

    As far as I can see, nothing is lost in translation. I asked some questions to my dad, because I just couldn't believe it. It was an advisor implementing the wrong thing, on specific demands of the customer, and he got sued for that.

     

    Ah yes, the ever adult "Well I heard one bad thing about your country so it must suck". Well, as has been said, in america you can be locked up without due process so I won't go there. In the UK failure to pay your tv licence can land you in jail, so I won't go there. In singapore chewing gum is illegal I won't go there, in Libanon it is legal to hit women in certain circumstances so I won't go there, Australia has crazed koalas, there are bunnies in france, canada has trees...*when will the madness stop*. ;)

     Still,as far the original post goes, I have my doubts about its veracity. It has a large monkey sandwich content (which is a dutch way of saying urban legend, though maybe not as nice). Especially when adding that his father knew about this 25 year old case... I'm sorry but that just doesn't cut it with me. If this story is true at all I'm sure the details would invalidate this being used as an example in similar cases. Though if such precedent exists it might be a way to make people think twice before making something they know is wrong....On the other hand, who has the right to decide that what I want to pay for is wrong? Maybe my defibrilator/cremation oven is a great idea that will save both time and lives. Isn't it my money to waste?

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