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Math

Submission + - The world's smartest company? (mirror.co.uk)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: It might just be the smartest company in the world; responsible for solving some of the toughest problems ever posed — from accurately mapping Dark Matter in the Universe to how to avoid buying dodgy vehicles at a used car auction. Kaggle – a collection of more than 17,000 PhD-level brains who compete for prizes in solving incredibly complex questions – is using the power of the internet to accelerate problem solving on a massive scale. Essentially, it's crowd sourcing for geniuses.

Submission + - Competition Shines Light on Dark Matter (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: For a decade, the world's brightest physicists have been working on understanding and mapping dark matter. On May 23, a consortium including NASA, the European Space Agency and the Royal Astronomical Society, opened up the problem on Kaggle, a platform for machine learning competitions. To detect the presence of dark matter, the consortium asked entrants to build algorithms that detect a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which causes distortions in the shape of a galaxy. In less than a week, Martin O'Leary, a PhD student in glaciology from Cambridge University made a breakthrough, outperforming the most commonly used algorithms in astronomy. O'Leary applied techniques common in glaciology, to detect the edges of glaciers from satellite images. As profound as the breakthrough is for cosmology, this competition is a prime example of how harnessing interdisciplinary approaches can help make significant scientific discoveries.
Math

Submission + - From movie recommendations to life and death (heritagehealthprize.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: The April 4 launch of the $3 million Heritage Health Prize was just announced by the Heritage Provider Network, a network of doctors. The competition challenges data hackers to build algorithms that predict who will go to hospital in the next year, so that preventative action can be taken. An algorithm might find that somebody with diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol is a 90 per cent risk for hospitalization. Knowing this, it might be cheaper for an HMO to enrol them in an exercise program now rather than pay the likely hospital bill. The competition takes the same approach as $1 million Netflix Prize, but solves a far more significant problem.
Math

Submission + - Gov 2.0 competition to predict commute times (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: Last week, Sydney's Minister of Roads, David Borger, launched a $10,000 competition to develop an algorithm that predicts commute times on a major Sydney freeway. The winning algorithm will be used to power predictions on the Sydney live traffic website. The hope is that the predictions will help commuters make informed decisions about when to travel and on what routes, lowering the intensity of peak hour traffic. In its first week, the competition attracted entries from more than 50 teams and 19 countries.

Submission + - Time to upgrade the Elo chess rating system (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: About six weeks ago, Slashdot reported a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performed better than the official Elo rating system. The competition has just reached the halfway mark and the best entries have outperformed Elo by over 8 per cent. The leader is a Portrugese physicist, followed by an Israeli mathematician and then a pair of American computer scientists. The fact that Elo has been so comprehensively beaten is a sure sign that half a century after it was developed, it's due for an upgrade.
Classic Games (Games)

Chess Ratings — Move Over Elo 133

Posted by timothy from the checkmate-and-perhaps-match dept.
databuff writes "Less than 24 hours ago, Jeff Sonas, the creator of the Chessmetrics rating system, launched a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performs better than the official Elo rating system. The competition requires entrants to build their rating systems based on the results of more than 65,000 historical chess games. Entrants then test their algorithms by predicting the results of another 7,809 games. Already three teams have managed create systems that make more accurate predictions than the official Elo approach. It's not a surprise that Elo has been outdone — after all, the system was invented half a century ago before we could easily crunch large amounts of historical data. However, it is a big surprise that Elo has been bettered so quickly!"

Submission + - Chess ratings - move over Elo (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: Less than 24 hours ago, Jeff Sonas, the creator of the Chessmetrics rating system, launched a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performs better than the official Elo rating system. The competition requires entrants to build their rating systems based on the results of more than 65,000 historical chess games. Entrants then test their algorithms by predicting the results of another 7,809 games. Already three teams have managed create systems that make more accurate predictions than the official Elo approach. It's not a surprise that Elo has been outdone — after all, the system was invented half a century ago before we could easily crunch large amounts of historical data. However, it is a big surprise that Elo has been bettered done so quickly!

Submission + - Crowdsourcing a new chess rating system (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: The Elo rating system was invented half a century ago by Hungarian physicist and chess master Arpad Elo. It is used throughout the chess world and has been applied to other contests, ranging from World of Warcraft to soccer. However, Elo's formula was derived theoretically, before we could easily crunch large amounts of historical data — so it is likely that modern approaches could do much better. Jeff Sonas, the creator of the Chessmetrics system, has just launched a competition to find a superior chess rating system. Competitors build their rating systems based on the results of more than 65,000 historical chess games. They then test their algorithms by predicting the results of another 7,810 games. Entries to the competition are benchmarked against Elo as well as other well-known rating systems (such as Glicko and Chessmetrics).

Submission + - Predicting entrepreneurial success (cnn.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: If you were trying to find successful entrepreneurs, what would you look for? An unusually high IQ? Wrong. Cooperation and team building over antagonism? Wrong again. The Founders Institute, a startup incubator, has developed a test that any population, any city, university, or country could use to determine who among them has the best shot at succeeding as an entrepreneur. The test favours founders with an interest in novelty, the ability to think on their feet and those who are the right age. CNN notes that the venture capital industry hasn't changed in 30 years, relying on networks, chance meetings and gut feelings. A quantitative test may prove to be a great way for venture firms to find opportunities that rival VCs have missed.
Crime

Submission + - Memphis uses data to cut crime (informationweek.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: What started as an experimental predictive crime-prevention initiative in 2005 has proven to be a fabulously successful program. Each week, the Memphis Police Department (MPD) examines the last four weeks' worth of crime data and links it to spatial information. Incidents are then plotted on a digital map, which is monitored around the clock. The MPD's software pinpoints crime hot spots, with details down to the day of the week and times of the day that are most active. The program has been credited as a primary driver of a 31% reduction in serious crime in Memphis since 2006.
Science

Submission + - Competitions facilitate real-time science (kaggle.com)

Submitted by databuff
databuff writes: In the age of ubiquitious communications technologies, it's inexplicable that the scientific literature evolves much as it did one hundred years ago. But perhaps competitions offer an effective solution. The best entry to a (still running) bioinformatics contest, requiring participants to pick genetic markers that correlate with a change in the severity of the HIV infection, had outdone the best methods in the scientific literature within a week and a half. Whereas the scientific literature tends to evolve slowly (somebody writes a paper, somebody else tweaks that paper and so on), a competition inspires rapid innovation by introducing the problem to a wide audience. So when this week the headlines announced the discovery of genetic markers that correlate with extreme longevity — what they missed was that the work took 15 years from beginning to publication. Had the study been run as a competition, with the raw data available to all, the results would have been generated in real time. Insights would have been available much sooner and with more precision.

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