undefined | Better HN

0 pointsIgorPartola5y ago0 comments

One of my favorite software solutions that I came up with was “human learning” powered. A few years ago I was working as the engineering manager at a small company. I had 8 other people who I was in charge of and we had moved to a new office in the middle of this. Our team took up two rooms in the office and I had to figure out who would be sitting where. I had some preconceived notions of who would be productive together, who would annoy each other, etc., but there were enough possible combinations to make this a large enough search space.

So I wrote a very simple python script that would randomly generate layouts of who would sit in each room and next to whom. Every time it gave me a result I scanned it for conditions that would make it not work and add a rule to skip such configurations. After about six such edits I got a layout I thought was acceptable. The team as far as I know was happy and nobody questioned it for the entire time we were there. This saved me time because I didn’t have to pre-program all the conditions, only add ones I had already seen not work. Saved both CPU and brain cycles, so to speak.

0 comments

npunt5y ago

This is great! In a way it's like the output was a question rather than an answer.

This is quite similar to education research on Teachable Agents [1], which is an embodiment of the idea that to know something you must be able to teach it to someone else. In Teachable Agents you teach the computer rules (e.g. how ecosystems work), and then it gets a quiz where it compares the output to the right answer. When its wrong, you as the teacher must figure out whether the rules you taught it were correct and/or if it needs more rules.

Teachable Agents works for things where there's a right or wrong answer, because the computer is doing the test proctoring. But in your method the human is doing that, and I think it works quite well for things of a more qualitative nature like the arts, with the human playing the role of the critic or curator.

[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/teachable-agents-making...

IgorPartolaOP5y ago

That is super cool, thank you!

kilotaras5y ago

There's a great talk from StrangeLoop[0] where a presenter uses Alloy modelling in exactly the same manner:

- generate a couple examples

- see something wrong

- add a rule

- repeat

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvNRlE4E9QQ

paul_f5y ago

Is this how sports schedules, NFL, NBA, etc are made?

maxerickson5y ago

They are heavily based on divisions and recent seasons.

(For example, in the NFL, the teams in each division play each other twice, and then get the rest of their games by rotating through teams from the rest of the league)

gcmac5y ago

This is a pretty cool video about a couple that made the MLB schedule for years https://youtu.be/yT0CMOGKKhU

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse