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Comment by sandaru1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm little bit sad to see that HN'ers are discussing the prize and money/time ratio instead of the challenge itself. What happened to the "hacker" in "Hacker News"?

I agree, money is a factor - but it doesn't have to decide your every move. This is an interesting challenge whether the prize offered is worth your time or not. The entrepreneurs are supposed to bunch of people who likes solving interesting challenges - not a bunch of people who likes solving interesting problems if only it makes you money.

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I've fired up R and am doing some exploratory data analysis. I think its an interesting problem and will definitely submit something if I can get decent predictions with the downloaded data.

I've looked at the literature and research has tackled such problems using computer science(neural nets) and statistics (linear regression, Kalman filters). In my opinion, its easier to approach it as a statistics problem than a computer science one and this may explain why there is some hostility on HN. For instance, getting $10000 for a linear regression is easy money (although I would be surprised if the winning entry used this).

That's fair enough I guess (I'm one of the persons who commented about the money & IP factors.)

However, there are literally millions of problems like this that you could choose to solve for your own challenge. As I see it, this specific problem is interesting enough but not especially so compared to the total set of possible computer-oriented challenges. Except for the fact it's being offered up with competition, fame and fortune as a reward.

Also, the IP factor seems to imply you can't, say, release an open source project with your winning algorithm and let anyone go away and use it. It seems you have to assign it entirely to the NSW RTA when you're done. That's actually the part that grates on me the most, it seems a lot more "contractor ethic" than "hacker ethic".

I thought like this for much of my life until I realized how badly the system exploits those who create value in science and technology.

I suspect we live in a world where about 90% of the value is created by about 1-2% of the people who receive maybe 5-10% of the economic benefit. Personally I'm not very satisfied with that distribution but I don't see it improving unless we become less naive about economic/legal/political matters.

Unfortunately I don't have time to ponder with this (explaining would be beyond the scope of a quick HN comment), but I think that using Markov chains/HMMs would be a nice way to attack this problem...

(Disclaimer: my area of expertise is not ML or AI, but I remembered this from one of the more interesting courses at university and always wanted to code something using it. If you know your way around these fields, I would love to read about other ideas/approaches...)

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