On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 4:43 PM Dan Stromberg <drsali...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 2:44 PM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> On Thu, Jun 17, 2021 at 7:35 AM Dan Stromberg <drsali...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > > >> How well can you define the things you're looking for? >> > > >> >> > > >> https://xkcd.com/1425/ >> > > >> >> >> > > He means that image processing is a hard problem that requires expertise >> > > to solve. >> > > >> > > > >> > > > Here is the image, I need to separate the road and markings from the >> > > rest and divide the image into squares of 100x100 pixels, for each >> > > square I >> > > need to check if it contains a road and markings: >> > > >> > > Can you define road in terms of an algorithm that looks at the pixels? >> > > >> > >> > I think that XKCD may be a little out of date. >> >> It's not out of date. The task still requires a lot of effort - it's >> just that the effort is now "preparing a suitable corpus" rather than >> "figuring out how on earth to do this". Even with all the tools at our >> disposal, there's still a stark (and often surprising) distinction >> between the easy and the hard. > > > Well... Are you sure? > > It's no longer a problem that requires 5 years and a research team.
That's because the research years have been done for that particular case. > It's now a problem that requires hunting for relevant labeled data, and > failing that, paying a small team of unskilled laborers minimum wage to > classify images from google images or similar. Plus some programming to > create the model and to use it in production. > > Deep Learning is catching on, in significant part, because lots of useful > data is becoming available. Also because hardware is getting faster and the > algorithms have improved. > > Clearly some things are harder than others, but the "hard" example given in > the XKCD is no longer really a good example. > I don't think it's a bad example. We needed hindsight to be able to figure that out - see the hover text. And it's still much MUCH harder to say "is this thing in this person's hand a gun?" than to say "is this light on?". But as we've seen from all the various voice-command assistants, the difficulty of doing a good job doesn't stop people from doing a bad job... "Close Spotify." // "Okay. Opening Spotify." ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
