Decision Mechanics

Insight. Applied.

Google Dataset Search

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Google have created a tool to make it easier to discover datasets—Google Dataset Search.

One potential downside is that it requires dataset owners to provide metadata. While the Google brand means that this might get some traction, not all dataset owners are motivated to help the cause. Publication of datasets is now mandated by some funding bodies, but that doesn’t mean that the datasets have to be discoverable. Ideally we’ll see funding bodies now mandating the addition of metadata.

While we wait for Google Dataset Search to evolve, we can still rely on curated repositories and lists such as

Jupyter Notebooks—love ’em or hate ’em?

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Jupyter Notebooks are popular with data scientists. Microsoft even offers a free, hosted, “no-install” service for Python, R and F#.

However, there are some downsides to notebooks—mostly to do with software engineering best practices.

Joel Grus gave a provocative talk at JupyterCon 2018 entitled “I Don’t Like Notebooks”. Yihui Xie then followed up with a response to Grus’ talk.

Both authors make a good case and have interesting points. As ever, the truth is that notebooks are good in some situations and not so good in others.

Personally, I use both. Notebooks for smaller, exploratory, data science projects and IDEs (Visual Studio Code, PyCharm and RStudio) for everything else.

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.