Thursday AI, Lunch, and Meeting

I finished Thursday in bed in my PJs with all my doors closed and locked. I checked, but I forgot to assemble the coffee for Friday morning. I was reading a SciFi book I picked up at the UFO Festival in Oregon in the summer, and it had languished in my pile of things yet to be read. I met the author, and the author (not wishing to assign a pronoun) signed it. It is a SciFi, LGBT, Fantasy, Romance blend, I was told. The writing uses unusual sentence structure and does not seem to be generated by an AI. A human wrote it. I have liked it, but I have just started it. It is a larger trade paperback with larger print, making it easier to read. After a few pages, I was nodding off. It was near midnight.

I worked on coding my AI contest solution on Kaggle’s website (kaggle.com) for about four hours. I managed to get three more successful submissions, which moved my score from 0.0 to 2.0, then to 6.7.  I started remembering how Pandas worked and that I needed to build a loop to process my data row by row, then apply my (quite weak) logic to every entry in the training data set. I was not following the usual approach of using the test set to train a model, test it, revise, and finally run a solution to discover my score (and any misses). Instead, I was trying to get the basic read the test data, supply some answer, and deliver the solution in the correct format.

My weak logic, you wonder, dear reader. Well, my 2.0 score was calculated by randomly picking one translation from the test data set, leaving it unchanged, and applying it to all answers. Totally useless, but better. My 6.7 was a variation. I applied a canned fuzzy logic via the Python library cutely named fuzzywuzzy

I see that some had managed my high score in one try, but most of those are copies of examples. The Kaggle website pays bragging rights and some cash for publishing your solution. Many people then copy these examples and try to improve them to better learn AI Python programming. I might borrow a snippet here and there, but I am looking to win and doing what everyone else is doing, and then trying to fix it does not sound like a winning plan.

I can see that an inference engine is being used with a processing control and CUDA (graphics processors now used in AI: NVIDIA GPUs). Nothing I have done before. I may follow-the-leader later, but at the moment, I am proud of my couple of hundred lines of simple code getting 6.7 and no engines.

It took me a while to work out my Python and Pandas code, which translates into me looking up Python code examples and then using them. I remember some, but not all the details. I spend hours on basics, but it has been years since I did one of these contests.

Before this, Corwin and I watched some Halo. He binge-watched the rest of Season 2 while we had Chinese-style leftovers, and I nodded off, then went to do some coding. We also popped in to Salt & Straw, where I had the vegan Banana Foster flavor with almost overwhelming banana and cinnamon. Much like the fiery dessert. I also got some baked products for Paris Baguette.

(yes, clear skies, a warm evening, and a bright thing in the sky; not our usual weather)

Jeff arrived around 9:30 and completed the work we planned for today mid-afternoon. I also had him replace some wall plugs that were showing their age. We talked about re-wiring the kitchen to be more to-code, but I passed as I would rather spend the money on travel and on Deborah.

Deborah had a snow day in Michigan, and we chatted here and there throughout the day while she caught up on work. Deborah will be here in Febuary and we are talking about what we will do when she is here.

I woke about 7, had coffee, and started writing the blog until midmorning. Showered, took meds, and all that. I then rushed off to have lunch with Scott at McMenamins Cedar Hills, our usual weekly meeting. We talked about travel and our investments. We avoided the chaos of politics in our discussions (though we are both ‘surprised’ liberal in outlook; i.e., we discovered our viewpoint mades us liberal when we are sure we never changed our moderate outlook). We both cannot believe the run-up in stocks after the war started. We are having some guilt over our great returns.

We enjoyed our chat, but we had things to do, me an SPRC meeting (for those who do not speak Methodist, the HR church committee). I drove home and had our 45 minute zoom meeting.

Corwin arrived while that was ongoing and Jeff finished his work and I wrote him a check for time and materials. And that takes me to a complete telling of Thursday, a bit jumbled but how I remembered it.

Thanks for reading!