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Comment by ryan-allen | Hacker News Reader

Would you consider this kind of action as 'scraping the bottom of the barrel'? In the design community so-called 'competitions' are considered rorts and shunned by anyone worth their weight.

What is ironic is that the NSW govt. probably have spent 50 times the figure working with private companies attempting to develop an acceptable solution, and this stinks of a last ditch effort.

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There is a fundamental difference between working on a problem like this and doing design work. If you work on this problem you will probably advance our knowledge in some domain and can even apply the results to other problems (such as network routing). Look at the groups that worked on the Netflix Prize. Most of the leading teams had academics seriously working on them.

With a design competition you are basically doing work for free and the only one that benefits is the one giving the competition.

the Netflix prize was a million bucks..

I wonder why they only offer $10k. It seems cheap, particularly, as you say, they probably spent WAY more than that trying to do this in-house.

$10k is honestly hardly worth my time. I guess they're hoping for that one bright high school kid... good luck!

Agreed. The Netflix Prize was $1M, and this doesn't seem like just 1% of the work. Not to mention Netflix only required an non-exclusive unrestricted license from the winning entry, rather than full reassignment of copyright (see tgflynn's comment.)

Except Netflix had a minimum standard of performance. This reads to me that the best entry submitted before time expires gets the prize, regardless.

Well Netflix also offered $50k each year for a "Progress Prize", but you're right.

I guess it is a question of "you get what you pay for", and I expect they'll get something quite usable but not great. Certainly good value for them, compared to contracting someone to do it.

I'll say. There is a lot of work in this, and $10k is not going to attract many professionals. They're obviously out for the talented hobbyist or beginner.

Considering how much the RTA budget would be, it's almost insulting. Just having a policeman sit in a car by some roadworks (so-called 'specials') would cost them about $1000/shift.

The last time a new road project got opened near me the launch party would have cost nearly $10,000 by the time it was done.

The prize should be at least 50 or 100,000. It would be a tiny spec in the budget but that would motivate people to spend some real time on the problem.

Take a look at some of the other projects on Kaggle - a lot of them have no money or roughly similar amounts. One of the main crowds Kaggle attracts is University students and staff, and they do these projects because they're interesting and fun. It's similar to a shared task at an academic conference, which is the sort of thing most of the active ML/KD&DM community are interested in.

I think you're mis-applying the example of design contests (which I agree are generally lame, but for a different reason). This is a chance for someone to do a public service and solve an interesting prediction problem. It's for the government and benefits commuters, not some for-profit corporation.

That said, I think this would be a more interesting contest if Sydney showed their current work on the problem and measured progress against it (a la Netflix)

I didn't know what it meant, so had to look up 'rort':

  1. a rowdy party or celebration
  2. a dishonest scheme

Could be either, I suppose! (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rort)

Developers like solving challenges, look at how popular topcoder is. The money's not the important thing for a lot of people.

Yeah. Probably 90% of the people who end up doing this competition would end up enjoying it anyway if there was no prize; the prize just provides the activation energy to actually sign up.

just create a ruleset and run a GA or simulated annealing on them for awhile

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