A group of researchers at the Chinese web services company Baidu have been barred from participating in an international competition for artificial intelligence technology after organizers discovered that the Baidu scientists broke the contest's rules.
The competition, which is known as the "Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge", is organized annually by computer scientists at Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan.
It requires that computer systems created by the teams classify the objects in a set of digital images into 1,000 different categories. The rules of the contest permit each team to run test versions of their programs twice weekly ahead of a final submission as they train their programs to "learn" what they are seeing.
However, on Tuesday, the contest organizers posted a public statement noting that between November and May 30, different accounts had been used by the Baidu team to submit more than 200 times to the contest server, "far exceeding the specified limit of two submissions per week."
Jitendra Malik, a University of California computer scientist who is a pioneer in the field of computer vision, compared the accusations against Baidu to drug use in the Olympics. "If you run a 9.5-second 100-meter sprint, but you are on steroids, then how can your result be trusted?" Mr. Malik said.
The episode has raised concern within the computer science community, in part because the field of artificial intelligence has historically been plagued by claims that run far ahead of actual science.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 06 2015, @09:26PM
It improves it.
If the goal is to play good moves then all players ought to be computer assisted.
The only reason to forbid it is because the goal isn't to play good games, it's to demonstrate virtuosity.