Decision Mechanics

Insight. Applied.

OpenAI bots beat top players in multiplayer video game

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A team of AI bots created by OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company co-founded by Elon Musk, have beaten former professional Dota 2 players. It’s only been a few months since the bots were losing to amateur players.

Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena game (MOBA) where two teams of five players compete to occupy each other’s bases.

While the human players displayed periods of indecision, the bots, known as the OpenAI Five, were able to coordinate their actions much more efficiently.

Making and implementing decisions requires effective communication. Coordination is one of five key factors to be considered when resolving dilemmas in confrontation analysis, for example.

The OpenAI Five will play an exhibition game against the winners of the main Dota 2 tournament at the end of August—pitting AI against the newly-crowned best players in the world.

Python tops programming language list

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Python has topped the IEEE Spectrum list of top programming languages again this year—extending its lead in the process.

The sources used to compiled the list cover

contexts that include social chatter, open-source code production, and job postings.

Obviously that list of sources isn’t an accurate reflection of what developers are doing day-to-day in organisations. Any list of top programming languages that puts R (#7) above JavaScript (#8) clearly has some methodological challenges. My belief is that the list reflects the current buzz around data science.

However, interest in Python clearly remains high. As it does in R—#7 is impressive for a domain-specific language.

How does data science make you faster, smarter, cooler or richer?

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In a recent interview, Cameron Davies, head of corporate decision sciences for NBCUniversal, discussed the importance of data science being led by the needs of the business.

He discussed “data culture” and the tendency for data scientists to focus on the technology while losing sight of the wider context.

Davies points out that decision-makers want to know

How does working with you, your data, or your new “tool” make me faster, smarter, cooler, or richer? Isn’t that what everybody is looking for?

Data scientists will fail to add value to their businesses until they can confidently answer those questions.

Python in the Economist

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The Economist has an article devoted to the popularity of the Python programming language. Citibank, Bain & Company and Boston Consulting Group are using it for their data science work.

As Guido Van Rossum, the inventor of Python, reportedly said

Python has become the language of choice for AI researchers […]

Microsoft Research Open Data

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Microsoft Research have released over 50 free data sets via their Open Data site. They include

  • 38 million tweets from the 2012 US presidential election
  • Profiles of 1 million celebrities (1000 with images)

Are there actually 1 million celebrities now?! Maybe someone can analyze the data to confirm. As in all data science we’ll need to start with firming up our definitions of terms—e.g “celebrity”.