Lisp Conversation with Gábor Melis, Google AI Contest Winner | Hacker News Reader

Lisp Conversation with Gábor Melis, Google AI Contest Winner

franz.com

The zdnet article has this passage in it: "The PlanetWars contest received extra attention due to a post on reddit titled “The end is near! Self-improving AI based on Genetic Programming is beating 95% of hand-coded submissions in the Google AI Challenge”. The genetic algorithm coded by a team calling itself space.invaders did better than expected but ended up in 277th place."

That really is quite an interesting development, given that the people that compete in these contests typically are pretty good at what they do, I'm really surprised that a GA derived program would do that well. Is there something about this particular challenge that sets the stage for that to happen or is there more to it?

http://ai-contest.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1136

I think two things:

1. The space.invaders team seemed to be good at what they were doing.

2. The "pretty good" people you refer to that also put in the required time to deliver a top bot is perhaps the top 50 (IMHO).

Is the video available somewhere that doesn't require both registration and Windows Media Player?

At least you can use a dummy email - it didn't require confirmation.

i can view it fine in chrome & ubuntu via

chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 9.0; WIndows NT 9.0; en-US))"

Try this:

  mplayer mms://a323.v235432.c23543.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/323/23543/v0001/citrixvar.download.akamai.com/23543/www/630/099/7858717095955630099/2-7858717095955630099-12da5740387.wmv

Or, if you prefer, try this shorter URL:

  mplayer http://tinyurl.com/46wsq3d

Here's the process I used to get that mms URL:

Using Opera, follow the link from the Franz site to the GotoMeeting site. Then, set Opera to "Mask as Internet Explorer" in the "Edit Site Preferences" dialog that you can access by right-clicking on the background of the site you want to edit preferences for. After that, you may need to reload the GotoMeeting site (or maybe even clear your cookies and reload).

The above procedure should hopefully keep GotoMeeting from noticing that you're not using Internet Explorer. The same procedure can be used on other sites that complain about your using an "incompatible" browser.

Anyway, next you should be able to fill out the registration form and then you should see a button called "View Recorded Webinar". When you click that button in Opera, you should be prompted to save a certain long-named ".asx" file. Save it as any name you like. Let's say you saved it as "foo.asx".

Then you should be able to play that file directly in mplayer by typing:

  mplayer -playlist foo.asx

Or, if you look inside that file (using cat or less) you should see the mms URL that I mentioned above.

That's it!

If any content providers happen to be reading this, please make your videos directly and simply downloadable as .mp4 or .avi or .wmv or .ogv videos, instead of making users jump through ridiculous hoops like this when they can't or don't want to use your streaming technology.

"This competition can be viewed as an AI contest. But it can also be viewed as a programming contest. And it was a question of speed: how quick your development is; how much your tools drag you down. This is where I see that Lisp is just great. It allows me to iterate extremely quickly over ideas."

Unsupported OS... Right....

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