1897: "Self Driving"

[Envelope Generator]

Title text: "Crowdsourced steering" doesn't sound quite as appealing as "self driving"

"Crowdsourced steering" makes me think "Let Twitch drive you to work".

[jonhaug]

I frequently fail at the Türing test when I typically get "Click on the images that contain a car" and have to try over and over.

/Jon

[Morgan Wick]

I also thought of TPP when I saw the alt text.

[cellocgw]

It's a lot more fun than that. Being in the safety/automated driving field myself, I dig up various papes on ... interesting phenomena. It turns out that nobody really knows in advance what a neural-net or other deep learning algo chooses as criteria for identifying a Stop sign. But some clever hacker-type guys have figured out how to change a few pixels in the image and get the algo to completely fail -- while not changing the image in a way noticeable to the human Mark-I eyeball.

check out, for example, arXiv:1312.6199v4 [cs.CV] 19 Feb 2014 , "Intriguing properties of neural networks"
Christian Szegedy Google Inc.
Wojciech Zaremba New York University
Ilya Sutskever Google Inc.
Joan Bruna New York University
Dumitru Erhan Google Inc.
Ian Goodfellow University of Montreal
Rob Fergus New York University

[jonhaug]

. But some clever hacker-type guys have figured out how to change a few pixels in the image and get the algo to completely fail -- while not changing the image in a way noticeable to the human Mark-I eyeball.

Well, this is just a typical game theoretical arms race.

(1) You solve a problem.
(2) Someone breaks it.
(3) You fix
(4) Goto (2)

Things do get better over time.

[rmsgrey]

Many years ago, there was a tank detection neural net that worked brilliantly on the training set, but failed under other conditions. It eventually turned out that, in the training set, all the photos of tanks were taken in direct sunlight, while the non-tank photos were taken while it was cloudy, so what they'd actually produced was a sunlight detector...

[cellocgw]

Wondering if the launch of perhaps the stupidest "We are hip to new technology" TV show since Scorpion, "Wisdom of the Crowd," triggered this drawing.

[addams]

oh, rmsgrey;
That is funny!

[Yu_p]

Until some time ago, such forms were predictable. The always came up, I entered a captcha, and was done with it.

Then came the smart ones. Sometimes they figure they don't have to verify me, sometimes I need several rounds until they consider me human.

The lack of consistency really gets me :/

[OFFTOPICRAMBLING]
Just like when they introduced the second generation of debit card readers here;

The first generation was homogeneous. All had the same shape, the card slot was at the same position and it made a peep everytime the user was required to perform an interaction.

In the second generation, they added credit-card support and became more varied. Some had the card slot at the top, some at the bottom. And for many, the sounds were developer feedback, with the sounds being entirely uncorrelated with whether the user has any action to take.

Now with NFC-enabled debit cards it is slightly better, but again there is inconsistency. No way to tell beforehand, whether you have to enter a PIN. Additionally while most readers will just ask for the PIN, our canteen's readers require inserting the card before entering it (which I haven't seen anywhere else so far).

Net result? The payment is most of the time slightly faster than before, but on average it is slowed down, because everyone is slow to react to the PIN request. I'll take predictable behaviour any time over unpredictable convenience :/
[/OFFTOPICRAMBLING]

[WK1]

Twitch Plays Street Racing!!

[Archgeek]

(1) You solve a problem.
(2) Someone breaks it.
(3) You fix
(4) Goto (2)

Come now, Goto is for noob-lords. I fix.

Code: Select all

while(3){
   You solve a problem.
   Someone breaks it.
   You fix
}

[Jorpho]

An ultimate solution to the Trolley Problem: crowdsource the decision, and then have the injured party sue everyone who voted for the injury. Distribute the settlement among everyone who voted the other way.

On the subject of captchas, did they run out of text to digitize, or did algorithms just get too good at digitizing text to make it useful anymore?

[Flumble]

(1) You solve a problem.
(2) Someone breaks it.
(3) You fix
(4) Goto (2)

Come now, Goto is for noob-lords. I fix.

Code: Select all

while(3){
   You solve a problem.
   Someone breaks it.
   You fix
}

I'm not sure whether the "while (3)" is intentional. Anyway, functional style is hot nowadays:

Code: Select all

mfix (solveProblem >=> someoneBreaks)


(burritos not included)

[orthogon]

Come now, Goto is for noob-lords.

On the contrary: the Linux kernel is full of gotos. They're used both by n00bs and by the 1337est of the 1337. It's just intermediate programmers who are advised to avoid them. (Like the way beginners and professional electricians will strip wire using a pair of pliers, whilst people with some skills will use the proper tool for the job. The pros don't need one; the beginners don't have one, and might not even know they exist. Is there a word for this phenomenon of non-monotonicity?)

Many years ago, there was a tank detection neural net that worked brilliantly on the training set, but failed under other conditions. It eventually turned out that, in the training set, all the photos of tanks were taken in direct sunlight, while the non-tank photos were taken while it was cloudy, so what they'd actually produced was a sunlight detector...

The version I heard, it was Russian vs US tanks, but apparently it was tank/no tank as you say. Here's a discussion of whether or not it's true.

Wondering if the launch of perhaps the stupidest "We are hip to new technology" TV show since Scorpion, "Wisdom of the Crowd," triggered this drawing.

I recently saw an episode of Bull based around a self-driving car. I almost couldn't watch it. The AI was Turing-test-passingly human, and the startup that designed it was a bunch of kids whose previous projects included a robot surgeon and a cure for cancer, or something. No matter that their "inventions" were in completely different fields. These kids were clever enough to do anything.

[jozwa]

Twitch Plays would work better if there was a sophisticated software that organized the whole thing basing every decision on the crowd's answers to simple questions. I don't know it could be a live play then though.

[Archgeek]

(1) You solve a problem.
(2) Someone breaks it.
(3) You fix
(4) Goto (2)

Come now, Goto is for noob-lords. I fix.

Code: Select all

while(3){
   You solve a problem.
   Someone breaks it.
   You fix
}

I'm not sure whether the "while (3)" is intentional. Anyway, functional style is hot nowadays:

Code: Select all

mfix (solveProblem >=> someoneBreaks)


(burritos not included)

HehEhEh, yes, yes it is. It's disturbing how many languages will evaluate that to while(true).
Also, I seem to've malformed that. It should've been

Code: Select all

You solve a problem.
while(3){
   Someone breaks it.
   You fix
}

Welp, it's one line, but does it make a difference under the hood from a while loop's single branch? Also, is that an operator or a warding glyph? I'm lead to wonder if they'll unironically implement a bijection <==> operator next, for those "if and only if" (or "iff") conditions.

[wumpus]

Come now, Goto is for noob-lords.

On the contrary: the Linux kernel is full of gotos. They're used both by n00bs and by the 1337est of the 1337. It's just intermediate programmers who are advised to avoid them. (Like the way beginners and professional electricians will strip wire using a pair of pliers, whilst people with some skills will use the proper tool for the job. The pros don't need one; the beginners don't have one, and might not even know they exist. Is there a word for this phenomenon of non-monotonicity?)

When was the last time a noob learned a language that featured a goto? I'd expect the Linux kernel to contain GOTOs because it is written "rather assemblerish C" and that JMP is more or less necessary in assembler and they want the compiler to emit a JMP.

Checking (does it have GOTO?):
Javascript: yes
Java: no
C: yes
C++: yes
Objective C: yes
Python: no
swift: no
PHP: yes
perl: yes

I'm wrong. Looks like they are making it too easy for even non-real programmers to program FORTRAN in any language (disclosure: I learned OO to write debuggable code after writing a bunch of FORTRAN code in Python. After a month I couldn't debug the FORTRAN code, but had the same thing debugged in a day after writing python in python. Don't do asynchronous network code in FORTRAN).

[keithl]

Self-driving cars? That's nothing. Microsoft just invented the self-flattening pedestrian. Shaped-charge exploding batteries in the Windows phone, ignited when a Google car passes closely.
The phone appears undamaged. The results look just like vehicular homicide. See you in court, Page and Brin!

[Heimhenge]

OP Envelope Generator said: "Crowdsourced steering" makes me think "Let Twitch drive you to work".

Reminded me of a serious (?) paper I read some time ago about "democratic self-driving buses" where the all passengers would have keypads for entering their desired destination. The bus then processes that data and computes the optimal route for its current riders. Wasn't so much "AI" as it was solving for the optimal path between nodes in a network. It might have been a paper on game theory.

Made sense to me at the time. Then I forgot about it until this comic. Wondering now if something like that is part of the AI in multi-passenger autonomous vehicles (like taxis).

[Moose Anus]

One way you can help robots destroy the world is by playing https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com.

[pkcommando]

(1) You solve a problem.
(2) Someone breaks it.
(3) You fix
(??)
.
.
.
(X) Skynet

FTFY

[dash]

That was a good one.

[Flumble]

Welp, it's one line, but does it make a difference under the hood from a while loop's single branch? Also, is that an operator or a warding glyph? I'm lead to wonder if they'll unironically implement a bijection <==> operator next, for those "if and only if" (or "iff") conditions.

Haskell people really like using lots of >, <, =, -, *, $ for their functions. So far I haven't seen an operator of more than 3 symbols, fortunately.
The (>=>) (type (b -> m c) -> (a -> m b) -> (a -> m c)) is kinda function composition with monads, like ∘ (type (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> (a -> c)) is regular function composition. Actually, there's no need for mfix and (>=>) since regular fix and (.) work fine on monadic stuff too and actually neither fix is working as expected.

The reason I wanted a one-liner (or rather a point-free expression) is because it doesn't require a name for the recursion

Code: Select all

life = do
  solveAProblem
  someoneBreaksIt
  life

Whichever name you choose, it's going to be lame in at least one of the two spots.

[suso]

I'm disappointed that clicking on Yes or No didn't do something spectacular in XKCD form.

[somitomi]

Like the way beginners and professional electricians will strip wire using a pair of pliers, whilst people with some skills will use the proper tool for the job. The pros don't need one; the beginners don't have one, and might not even know they exist. Is there a word for this phenomenon of non-monotonicity?

Pssshht, pliers are so pro-ish noob. The real noobs strip wires with a pair of scissors or their teeth.

[orthogon]

OP Envelope Generator said: "Crowdsourced steering" makes me think "Let Twitch drive you to work".

Reminded me of a serious (?) paper I read some time ago about "democratic self-driving buses" where the all passengers would have keypads for entering their desired destination. The bus then processes that data and computes the optimal route for its current riders. Wasn't so much "AI" as it was solving for the optimal path between nodes in a network. It might have been a paper on game theory.

Made sense to me at the time. Then I forgot about it until this comic. Wondering now if something like that is part of the AI in multi-passenger autonomous vehicles (like taxis).

Isn't that exactly the Traveling Salesman problem? I'd heard of it mainly as a computational complexity thing, but I guess AI approaches could find good suboptimal solutions.

Like the way beginners and professional electricians will strip wire using a pair of pliers, whilst people with some skills will use the proper tool for the job. The pros don't need one; the beginners don't have one, and might not even know they exist. Is there a word for this phenomenon of non-monotonicity?

Pssshht, pliers are so pro-ish noob. The real noobs strip wires with a pair of scissors or their teeth.

Blimey, I'd forgotten about teeth. That was my preferred method for years.

[Archgeek]

Like the way beginners and professional electricians will strip wire using a pair of pliers, whilst people with some skills will use the proper tool for the job. The pros don't need one; the beginners don't have one, and might not even know they exist. Is there a word for this phenomenon of non-monotonicity?

Pssshht, pliers are so pro-ish noob. The real noobs strip wires with a pair of scissors or their teeth.

Heh, and pros who've gotten needlessly good can strip wires with nearly anything, including the claws of a passing housecat.

[keithl]

Pssshht, pliers are so pro-ish noob. The real noobs strip wires with a pair of scissors or their teeth.

Blimey, I'd forgotten about teeth. That was my preferred method for years.

Did you stop when you were down to two teeth, or could you strip wire with the jagged remaining single tooth?

edit: Second question: spit or swallow?

edit edit: Third question: If swallow, what is your favorite insulation flavor?

[serutan]

Many years ago, there was a tank detection neural net that worked brilliantly on the training set, but failed under other conditions. It eventually turned out that, in the training set, all the photos of tanks were taken in direct sunlight, while the non-tank photos were taken while it was cloudy, so what they'd actually produced was a sunlight detector...

Heh. I was going to point out that very thing. Saw an article on it in the early 90s when the place I was working for
briefly experimented with them.

[orthogon]

Pssshht, pliers are so pro-ish noob. The real noobs strip wires with a pair of scissors or their teeth.

Blimey, I'd forgotten about teeth. That was my preferred method for years.

Did you stop when you were down to two teeth, or could you strip wire with the jagged remaining single tooth?

edit: Second question: spit or swallow?

edit edit: Third question: If swallow, what is your favorite insulation flavor?

Chewing on a nice bit of PVC helped me concentrate on the connection I was making. I'd spit it out eventually. I did lose a bit of my lower left incisor recently, but if that was caused by my youthful wire stripping activity, there was about a three decade delay after I stopped doing it!

(I have a counter-theory: my incisors play the role of the snare drum in my internal drumkit with which I accompany my humming. Anybody else do this?)

[Eternal Density]

Twitch Plays + Drive To Work = RoboRosewater

/obscurepun

[Soupspoon]

Reminded me of a serious (?) paper I read some time ago about "democratic self-driving buses" where the all passengers would have keypads for entering their desired destination.

For the past few days, now, I've been trying to ID a comedy sketch (could be anything from Monty Python to Little & Large, as far as my memory goes for what show it was on) which had a bus where every seat had a steering wheel (and implied accelerator/brake?), so that everybody had an input. Perhaps according to how much they fed into their personal coin-slot, to dictate how much proportional influence everybody input to the vehicle.

The denoument was (view: external) the bus swerving and u-turning wildly across whatever street-like setting they were filming on (prob. an open-air car park surfaced but unmarked carpark), the passenger/drivers inside franticly playing the controls towards their own contradictory ends, like some form of linked slot machines or a Camel Racing booth at a fairground...

[orthogon]

Reminded me of a serious (?) paper I read some time ago about "democratic self-driving buses" where the all passengers would have keypads for entering their desired destination.

For the past few days, now, I've been trying to ID a comedy sketch (could be anything from Monty Python to Little & Large, as far as my memory goes for what show it was on) which had a bus where every seat had a steering wheel (and implied accelerator/brake?), so that everybody had an input. Perhaps according to how much they fed into their personal coin-slot, to dictate how much proportional influence everybody input to the vehicle.

The denoument was (view: external) the bus swerving and u-turning wildly across whatever street-like setting they were filming on (prob. an open-air car park surfaced but unmarked carpark), the passenger/drivers inside franticly playing the controls towards their own contradictory ends, like some form of linked slot machines or a Camel Racing booth at a fairground...

I know what you're thinking of: recent news coverage of our government's approach to Brexit.

[Flumble]

Your government has an actual bus with 40 steers? I wish ours was as cool.

[orthogon]

Your government has an actual bus with 40 steers? I wish ours was as cool.

Well, actual buses and Brexit do go together...

[Weeks]

I frequently fail at the Türing test when I typically get "Click on the images that contain a car" and have to try over and over.

/Jon

The Türing test, named after Ålan Türing

[speising]

I frequently fail at the Türing test when I typically get "Click on the images that contain a car" and have to try over and over.

/Jon

The Türing test, named after Ålan Türing

Türiñ.

[SuicideJunkie]

These cars are trying to pass the Touring test. Which is both easier and harder in certain ways.

[SDK]

TwitchPlaysDriving

[jc]

Reminded me of a serious (?) paper I read some time ago about "democratic self-driving buses" where the all passengers would have keypads for entering their desired destination. The bus then processes that data and computes the optimal route for its current riders. Wasn't so much "AI" as it was solving for the optimal path between nodes in a network. It might have been a paper on game theory.

Made sense to me at the time. Then I forgot about it until this comic. Wondering now if something like that is part of the AI in multi-passenger autonomous vehicles (like taxis).

Isn't that exactly the Traveling Salesman problem? I'd heard of it mainly as a computational complexity thing, but I guess AI approaches could find good suboptimal solutions.

It's not quite exactly the Traveling Salesman problem. It has an extra twist that the famous problems lacks: A "bus" inherently describes a vehicle that makes frequent stops, to add and/or lose passengers. At every such stop, the list of destinations will often change. This could lead to a problem that has popped up in a number of "clever" disk-drive optimizations: Destinations at the outer ends of the travel path can easily get "starved" because there's always a closer destination which may be a shorter distance away in the opposite direction.

When this bug pops up with disks, the usual solution is to restrict the allowed choices to those that are "forward" in the current direction, and ignore choices that may be closer but require reversing the direction. When the last destination in the current direction is reached, the direction is flipped. This is trivial on a disk drive that has only "inward" and "outward" directions. But our AI bus would presumably service a 2-D area instead, and a more complex algorithm would be required.

I wonder if anyone has tackled this as a real-world problem? Google didn't turn up anything relevant, but maybe I didn't guess the right keywords. Shipping companies might run into a version of this a lot, where customers are constantly sending in new requests, while the fleet's drivers are driving along whatever routes the company controllers last sent them, and they're probably used to getting route changes at many stops. Anyone know if this has been solved? (And what it's called?)