A Winner-Takes-All MMO-SAT | Hacker News Reader

A Winner-Takes-All MMO-SAT

mschfboard.org

127 pointsmtoner2346 comments

This are the same group that made the "satan" Nikes with Lil Nas X a few years ago[0], and the guy behind Wordle works there[1].

[0] https://www.cnn.com/style/article/lil-nas-x-mschf-satan-nike... [1] https://powerlanguage.co.uk/

Bit off topic, but I had no idea Josh Wardle also did Place and The Button at Reddit.

Holy bananas what a weird connection

And he worked with Chad Birch who runs the almighty tildes.net

One fun aspect of this is that it meets the legal bar for the kind of contests that are pretty regulated. As such, they include an extensive terms and conditions pdf, which happens to contain a section on conduct and cheating.

The tension between the T&Cs and the spirit of the contest is delicious.

So the main site and the spirit of the contest says "Everyone will be cheating, and we don't care. Cheating is a legitimate test-taking strategy."

Meanwhile the terms includes all sorts of things, including disallowing whatever the purveyors consider "unsportsmanlike" conduct. The whole section is vague enough to be fun to think about. (edit: removed the exact quote. it's long and didn't add much)

I certainly know where I would draw the line between the kind of cheating allowed and the kind of cheating not allowed, but I expect we'd find a wide variety of where even HN readers would draw that line.

Full context makes it a bit more clear. I don't think you can reasonably argue this is an invitation to hack. But yeah, interesting point.

"Unlike typical standardized tests, the MSAT is taken online and in private. Everyone will be cheating, and we don’t care. Cheating is a legitimate test-taking strategy."

Well it wouldn’t be very fun or fair if the allowed cheating included stealing/getting the answer sheet from the organizers. There’s a difference between that and the test being “open book”. An open book test is barely even helpful for something like the SAT, assuming you can’t find the answers to the actual questions online

Given the "no-holds-barred, first-past-the-post" nature of this, the winner will be a group of people who split the test and each solved their part.

Definitely. But how will they split the 154 questions? The prize pool is already big enough ($13k just a couple hours after the announcement and 5 days before the registration deadline) that 50 people could take it together and walk away with $260 each.

They can avoid that if you have to answer the questions in order one by one, without the possibility of going back to previous questions.

That would be hell. One of the best tactics I remember using on the paper one was skipping things and coming back later.

Can't you just setup one sacrificial account to grab the question pool, pass it out for distribution to solve, gather it back up, then step through the question pool with the solution set? Essentially they just collect the questions and answer something knowing the run won't be a success.

Unless these questions are sampled from a larger question pool, a single registration sacrifice for Intel gathering seems worth the cost. You can even distribute the loses to your pool after. Worst case scenario your group loses the admission fee + adminision fee/group size.

This is the answer.

* Sacrificial account crawls all the questions and puts them in queue

* Team members pull questions one by one - and push answers back

* Leader fills out answers as soon as the current one comes in (assuming you can't jump backwards/forwards)

As long as the people are good enough at these kinds of tests, you'll win. It'll probably end up being a battle of 10+ teams that work like this

You will need some error checking though. There is no trade off between accuracy and time here. Someone will get a 1600 and then if your team misses one you lose. Maybe each queued question goes to 3 people and unless all agree it goes to everyone's queue for vote.

How do you build such a system when there's no example of how the website will be formatted?

You have humans do the actual work, where computers are just there for faster organization of human effort:

an app with two queues:

- those who input questions by copy and pasting them into an app or transcribing them, or speech to text -- apple offers all of these to iOS users in plain ol textboxes as far as I'm aware. - those who solve by reading from the app and submitting answers.

Have N inputters getting all of the questions Have M solvers solving

This builds your answer bank.

Have someone submit from the answer bank with a text based search.

The "system" could be a shared Google Doc. I'm not sure you'd even want anything more complicated than that. The level of automation required here doesn't extend beyond copy-paste. The sacrificial account "crawl" is a human being with Google Docs open.

* leader runs away with the pot

Maybe pulls a question and distributes it to the group, everyone answers, leader chooses the most popular answer. If you have to enter answers one at a time anyway there isn't as much opportunity to parallelize the task. You might get some win from the reading comprehension questions, but even then being 100% right is priority #1, as you can assume there will be multiple teams that get perfect scores.

How do you know all accounts will receive the same questions in the same order?

I doubt it's going to actually be the SAT.

Has anyone tried to solve SATs with AI yet?

Given that one question missed means you lose, you have to be very careful to choose a good team. I've gotten a perfect score on a standardized test (during high school) but while I know a lot of smart people, I know no one who has also gotten a perfect score. And it's hard to know how to quickly distribute the test since the online format hasn't been released.

Obviously it's unclear how much the MSAT will follow the real SAT. However after learning about the college admission scandal [1] I have been wondering how much my perception of the SAT being difficult is biased towards the experience of taking it in highschool. Ultimately it claims to estimate your performance as a college freshman so one would imagine that after a successful college and professional career most people would do moderately well on it. On the other hand the test itself is probably not a good indicator of college success so who knows.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_brib...

I was kinda hoping for some kind of live 3SAT solver competition.

College-admissions SAT is still a good callout though, and probably more relevant / memorable to more people.

I was disappointed to see MSCHF move from doing a lot of making physical stuff to making mostly raffles/lotteries like this.

It's probably a lot harder/more expensive with the state of supply chains and travel and quarantine right now.

I imagine just designing at the pace they do is harder when you're not in the same physical space

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSCHF

Got a free Saturday so I entered, wish me luck!

Did pretty well on the actual SAT way back when, curious to see how it changed.

I'll be taking it with a buddy who will go through questions on the computer, answer what they can, and yell out ones for me to calculate or google on my laptop while they go on to do the rest, then come back when I'm done.

A two-way split is probably the most fun/profitable.

I stalked them and I found one more very interestinig project they have, called Tontine. Everyone pays $10, and you have to log in every day. If you don't log in, you're out. Last person standing wins the pool.

It's only been 63 days, so it's ongoing. $71.4k pool, 2.4k living, 4.6k dead.

link: https://tontine.cash/?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=tontine...

This one will probably be going for a hundred years or more. I don’t see how anyone will ever collect this money. At least one person wrote a script that’ll make sure they’re online and it’ll probably never go down.

Can a model be trained in 4 days fast enough to score a perfect on this, under cost? It becomes a weirdly positive feedback loop if the pool keeps going up and up.

I'm looking forward to the test coming out, and a perfect score being posted 5 seconds later

Its strange that MSCHF (Mischief) brands itself as an "art collective". They don't really seem like an Art company so much as just an advertising company. I posit the reasoning is to be more hip. They have a CEO! If it were at least a workers syndicate or something of that nature I would say its less of a pointless branding.

For devil's advocate, you could say the same thing about Andy Warhol. They explore aspects of American pop culture, and I think a lot of their projects are really fun.

Advertising what?

》

brings up the "QA ANSWER KEY" with plausible-looking multiple-choice answers. Given the link they provided for "Full MSAT Answer Sheet" this is almost certainly a troll, but it would be terribly amusing if they put the real answer sheet here.

And of course this doesn't work in Firefox because / opens up quick find. Because some people don't bother to make sure their sites run on browser engines other than Chromium and Blink.

As the spirit wanes, the standardized test appears.

I feel this comment isnt going to get a lot of love but appears to be saying something interesting. Can you explain it further?

The parent is saying that after the liquor runs out, cops come by with breathalyzers.

You are in a darkened corridor...

It's an allusion to a Charles Bukowski poem called "Art": "As the spirit wanes, the form appears."

Given the provenance (MSCHF), I guess we can safely assume that the..."unfortunate"...MschfBoard logo was fully intentional.

Only for US :( It makes sense, but still. I took the SAT despite living in another country.

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