Manuel Rodriguez

Greetings to the chat. I was absent for a while. In the meantime the SE.AI forum seems nearly unchanged. Many new questions were posted. As far as i can see all of them have to do with Artificial Intelligence, so the forum fits great to my individual needs. A short look into the menu has shown, that the queues are the same. There is First post queue, a close votes queue, and one for low quality posts. Also the upvote and downvote button under each question seems to be unchanged.

@DuttaA The reason why a certain question wasn't closed is available in the timeline, In the case of “AI: modern approach” two users have voted to leave it open, ai.stackexchange.com/posts/16921/timeline

Tip of the day: if a certain user should be investigated on a content perspective, it's possible to enter a string like “user:11571 NEAT” into the search box. The example will search only for postings created by me about the topic of neuroevolution. This allows to determine, what a certain user but not the forum knows about the subject.

From a technical perspective this is possible by reducing the reputation of an admin to 1, similar to the community user. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19738/…

The term for banning all the users and closing all the question is “complete shutdown” of a website. In the history of Wikipedia, there is a myth available about a power admin who was drunk from his power. He has deleted all the content, and stopped all other users to login. The best strategy to prevent such behavior is to lower the tasks of an admin to a minimum. That means, he will become the elected king without a kingdom.

or if the fair judgment would be only -1 downvotes. But, the more interesting question is, why are only 4 people here in the chat but not 40 or 400? I think, that most of the quality problems are solved automatically with a larger user base. It seems, that all the programmers and computer experts are feeling comfortable at Stackoverflow and nobody is motivated to look for something which is more relevant.

overall traffic is located outside SE.AI. Which means, it's origin is the education system, the technological level in the world and in the amount of people who are interested in Artificial Intelligence. Sure, it's possible to play the blame game and criticize if the last answer of a user was well enough to receive 2 upvotes,

Let us imagine a scenario. Suppose, i didn't have discovered SE.AI around 2 years ago. That means, in the scenario, not a single posting was written by me. Would this change the development of the website so great? My guess is, that the individual influence is low and the more important reason for the increase or decrease of the

@DukeZhou Perhaps you have recognized the massive recent downvotes in my account earlier than i, but if external users are pressing buttons on the website it's their right to do so. The only thing what i'd like to criticize is, that I'm the only one who has received so much downvotes. I think, that other users here in the forum have also shown, that they are able to resist against conflicts.

Correct. The combination of a dialogue based answering plus the ability to search in the archive is a unique feature, not available in normal publications. The papers which are provided at Arxiv aren't interactive and chatbased interaction with a supervisor during phd writing isn't archived. So it make sense to argue, that SE.AI is able to earn a dedicated credibility.

@nbro There is no need that SE.AI has a high credibility, it's enough, if users get the answer they need. Trust is something which is given to the website, if an OP accepts an answer and it has to be earned in each single case.

@DukeZhou The terminology of remedy and transgressivity was introduced by sociology to describe group behavior with a certain bias. The problem with the models used in sociology is, that they are based on information centralization. The assumption is, that somewhere in the core, the management is located which is observing and directing the group. This kind of vocabulary was useful in the 19th century for handling easy moderation problems but it's less suited for a modern scrum based management.

@nbro Perhaps it make sense to explain how group interaction is working. Not a single user is allowed to moderate, but a Q&A website produces a chaotic behavior which is the result of conflicting social roles. There is a person who creates a question, another person provides an answer, the next person is judging about the quality and so on. Every user can be replaced by someone who is able to play the same social role.

@nbro @nbro It sounds a bit uncommon, but I'm happy with receiving downvotes for my answers. It shows, that the community is trying to improve the overall quality and creates a pressure to the users who are attempt to answer a question. In the given case with the checkers/MCTS problem, the question has received a lot of upvotes (+12) while all answers together have accumulated -8 downvotes. This kind of relationship is great.

(The number about the ivory tower are based on the assumption that 3% of all the papers and all the academic writers are focussed on Artificial Intelligence).

@JohnDoucette quote “But researchers are busy folks, and it may be difficult to recruit from that pool.”, – Instead of trying to improve something, the first step is describe the current situation. Today, SE.AI has around 7 new questions per day, which are generated and answered by approximately 150 users. In contrast, the university ivory tower is producing 165 papers about Artificial Intelligence each day which is generated by approximately 300000 experts in that field.

@nbro quote "Do you like more Python or Java for AI?". Java is better, because a stack-based language can be created easily with automatic programming while a procedural language code is much harder to synthesize from a description in an ontological format. Orlov, Michael, and Moshe Sipper. "FINCH: A system for evolving Java (bytecode)." Genetic Programming Theory and Practice VIII. Springer, New York, NY, 2011. 1-16.

@nbro It sounds, that the problem which question should be closed and which not will remain a hot topic in the future. As far as i can see from the Meta forum, there is a dedicated tag (scope) which is reserved only for such conflicting opinions. I'm relative sure, that the users in SE.AI are not able to agree on a shared position, so it will become exciting in every single close-voting.

under the topic exclusionist vs inclusionist.

@nbro If i have understood your concern right, you see many questions which should be closed by the user voting system. The reason why these questions aren't closed, is because other users have a different definition of the term offtopic. User1 has pressed the close button, but user2 has pressed the “leave open” button. The question isn't, if a question fits to SE.AI but how to convince other user to judge in that way. In the Wikipedia universe the problem is discussed

@nbro What is the desired close percentage? Each user has the ability to vote for close or leave open a question. Instead of arguing with the question itself, it make sense to define what the target corridor is. Is a close percentage of 0% acceptable, which means that no question at all are put on hold and defined as offtopic, do we like a ratio of 10% which means that sometimes a question is closed or is the wanted ratio 30% which means, that very often an OP is rejected.

@nbro quote: “with a large number of questions per day, [...] on seeing the same usual questions, where the user does not put effort into writing it.” It's interesting, how different the perception can be. The real threat is, that a question demands too much background knowledge which can't be provided by SE.AI. Suppose a phd student who has developed an AI projects in the past, formulates a question. Is SE.AI capable of answering the issue on the same and even a higher level?

@nbro Questions are the key, if someone tries to moderate a public forum. A question is a request to a system and the system has to response. A question is some kind of command which forces the community to think about a subject in a certain way. Giving questions more attention is equal to lower the power of existing moderators inside the Stackexchange website. The future direction is controlled by the users outside the community.

@user76284 Is policy iteration combined with model-iteration of the underlying system, or is the forward model which predicts future states is fixed?

@nbro It seems, that the post is only the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the post, a reference to a one month old posting was given. There it was written, that in the Stackexchange network some moderators have resigned and other are suspended. The overall paranoia level has increased.

@BrianO'Donnell My comment is an addition to the answer in which you has also described, that the WaveNet algorithm is superior to ByteNet. Providing the bibliographic metadata helps the newbies to read the information in the fulltext paper.

@nbro A little bit, the question is offtopic because Artificial Intelligence is only about the software of a robot but not about material science. On the other hand, self-replicating nanorobots are located within Singularity so it will become a topic in the future.

@DukeZhou According to the activity log, 8 questions were closed. In most cases, the topic was about the usage of existing neural network libraries like Keras and Tensorflow. According to the Stackoverflow website, there is a Keras tag too with over 42k questions available, the same is true for Tensorflow and LSTM. Most questions on SO are about how to install the program, how to config the ini file so that it can work with the GPU and problems while running a concrete neural network.

@Mez13 Word2vec is a neural network which outputs the similarity between two words. For example the pair “france” and “spain” has a cosine distance of 0.68, stackoverflow.com/questions/21979970/… In a python script, the number can be used to rank results from a search engine.

@nbro Hi nbro. Thank you for your recent critique under my answer. Serious downvotes from an experienced user are helping a lot to improve the answer quality. In exchange, i was looking into your recent answers to find a critique as well, but with your postings everything is fine and i didn't found a reason to downvote.

@DuttaA What will happen, if a highly optimized algorithm runs on the fastest quantum computer on earth? Right, the resulting robot will run very fast. He can do in a single hours many pick&place operations and he can drive a vehicle much faster than a human can do. For a robot, the human civilization will look like what Deanna Troi has noticed in Star Trek TNG 6x25 Timescape, in which the time at the Enterprise was froozen.

@DuttaA A future, in which AGI is possible isn't very funny. Recently a new algorithm was presented which is able to write Wikipedia articles zmescience.com/science/news-science/google-ai-wikipedia-043242

@nbro I'm happy with the service. The only thing what i doesn't like is if somebody downvotes a question of a newbie. Any other action against normal users (especially long term users like me) is ok and improves the overall quality.

Somebody has deleted my comment under a post. But that's no problem, because all what i have to do is to adapt my prediction model how SE.AI works. The new assumption is, that sometimes comments will disappear and there is no logfile available similar to the mediawiki history which will make the change visible. That means, that in theory i can claim that my comment was deleted even it doesn't happen and no higher instance will decide who is right.

@AIMetaQuestions The comment under the MCTS question ai.stackexchange.com/a/12785/11571 was deleted recently by the moderator. But never the less i think that the answer had a low quality, so my downvoting remains active. It seems, that there is more than one opinion available.

I don't think that special actions are needed here but i think an improved prediction model what an asker will do make sense. There is a certain chance, that an edit is made undo, especially if the edit contains of URLs.

I have extended an AI career question with two helpful links ai.stackexchange.com/questions/12713/… which are directing to websites in which the same question was already discussed. It's about the number of needed AI engineers in the future. Unfortunately the OP has made my recommendation undo and he insists on his previous one sentence question.

... Because I've written the first Reddit post this time you should do it, because it's your story which should be shared with a larger audience. This would increase the amount of paranoia further.

Excellent work nbro. The next step is to compare the written text of these accounts against each other with a natural language processing tool, for example with a neural network. If the similarity is high or even very high, this would be a nice story for Reddit. The headline could be “Was SE.AI fooled?” and then, all the details of your investigation can be presented.

The recommended introduction to the introduction is perhaps “Hasslacher/Tilden (1995): Living machines”, a short paper which explains artificial life from an analog perspective. This paper helped me to find a way into the subject of AI.

If Business Theatre ontopic? Recently, i've discovered the term business theatre. The idea is to use classical theater play for the subject of the workplace. Employees are encouraged to become actors and the hope is to give new insights to become more productive. Does Workplace@stackexchange believe that this idea make sense?

@PlayerOne “and don't take it personally if they disappear.” No i don't, because i have analyzed workplace stackexchange on a content level and there is a pattern available in which case a posting gets deleted. According to a naive misconception, “customer orientation” doesn't has a double meaning, but it's an established academic term which can be researched at Worldcat.org. It can be formalized within the Artificial Intelligence domain to describe a business workflow.

Is “customer orientation” offtopic in workplace at Stackexchange? I have noticed that my recent comment was deleted in the thread “How to avoid after work hours team dinner?”, probably because i have argued with the customer in mind, to decide if a dinner makes sense or not. It seems that postings which aren't focussed on the organizational structure itself, but are trying to expose the broader picture are recognized by the workplace community as not helpful. Is my assumption correct?

Hello friends at Workplace@SE. I have discovered an interesting recent question which is “How to deal with manager who refuses to communicate with a team member?” it fits quite well to the workplace-website and has become some answers yet. Is my help needed to improve the existing answers?

Can i ask a question or maybe not? Today, i have tested out to press the “ask question” button on the frontpage of the website. It's working well and showed the input box in which a title plus the body text can be entered. This was a surprise, because 2 days ago, only a message was shown on the screen, that currently it's not possible to post new questions. So I'm a bit unsure, if it's ok to ask a question here at Workplace or not.

In response to my previous posting, 1 hour ago, i have created the question which contains 3 paragraphs and was adapted to the recommendation of describing the hierarchical levels. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to post the question because the workplace website prevents it.

@motosubatsu Sorry, but my knowledge about fuzzy logic isn't that great. The linguistic term “probably” is measured in the membership function with the value 0.8?

Hello Workplace chat. I have a question about the inner working of a service desk. But before I'm posting the question with the official “ask” button, I'd like to know if it's ontopic or not. The question is, about the responsibility of a supervisor to create a ticket in the issue tracker, or it's up to the first level agent in doing so. Thank you.

@Bellerophon Closing means, that it's escalated to a higher instance which is an expert for such cases, which is me. So i have to modify the question to increase the acceptance rate in the next trial. One option would be to use the style element of a dialogue to make clear what is going on the mind of the robots while negotiating to each other.

Hello Forum. I have a question about a futuristic help.desk in which robots are interacting with each other. It was posted to the workplace forum at workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/147040/… but it wasn't welcome there. Can the question migrated to the worldbuilding forum?