Tell me about it!
My emphasis on “objective criteria” is, of course, where all of The Great and The Good who pursue the meta-prize of being The Prize Award Nexus (X-Prize Foundation, Gates Foundation Grand Challenges, etc.) fall from grace and invite social climbers to kill their mission by occupying positions, first, as judges (to get some of that sweet sweet social status) and then as creators of prize criteria that permits them even greater subjective latitude hence even more personal prestige.
That is, of course, why I was so insistent on an objective Artificial Intelligence prize alternative to The Turing Test. The irony here is that although I am on the judging committee for that prize, the very fact that I made it so objective has been used to impunge my character! How could this be?
The cyberwar waged against the West unleashed by Disraeli’s imposition of English on India ran over those like my self who failed to focus on capturing positive network externalities of the transistor and instead focused our energies on filling in the non-obvious gaps. So when this happened in a particularly egregious manner with the DotCon bubble and given my background in trying to affect public policy, I spoke out against the H-1b fraud and its implications for the West. To the sleazy moral zeitgeist, this meant that I was a Nazi or something – but whatever I was, I was a moral monster and social pariah who simply hated Indian programmers because they were my Betters. That’s why I couldn’t get a job with the Big Boys that had piles and piles of economic rent sitting in their vaults. I was just a bitter old man who was suffering from envy.
Right?
So in the latest Hutter Prize award we had, for the first time, a contest winner that was a south Asian immigrant. It turns out the judging work fell on me because Marcus is utterly inundated with his role as DeepMind senior scientist and Matt is enjoying a rather lavish retirement (his not having committed career suicide). It was a rather involved judging process since the entry did not run properly and I had to work with the contestant to get it in shape to actually compress and decompress the enwik9 Wikipedia corpus, but we got it done after about of month of back and forth.
Then once we got it to work, I told Marcus to award the money, I asked the contestant for his BTC address, I transferred my $100/month donation to the Hutter Prize in BTC to the contestant and Marcus made the announcement, transferring the money.
It was then up to me, as usual, to go around announcing the winner to the public, as is my role.
The fact that there is no discretion in judging the Hutter Prize due to it being so objective resulted in folks disparaging my character – imputing to me a psychological problem in being FORCED to judge in favor of someone I obviously just hate due to his being my Better.
As a result of all the work I had to do because of the problems with this entry, I’ve proposed to the other judges that the judging process be entirely automated in the Google cloud. I’m working on that as a low priority since the likelihood of the next entry coming along anytime soon is so low given THE STUPIDITY of the machine learning world failing to back the Hutter Prize with the billions that should be in the prize purse.
