joyboy

Former CP0 | KingofSnails | HightechLowlife

[joyboy @kingofsnails_]

ok i guess i never made an 'official' announcement but to clarify for all you joyboy fans out there (LOL), i have switched back to falco and to b0xx for the foreseeable future.

i will probably be entering tournaments either this month or next so peep the progress

[Gorgi @gorgi222]

I love this clip so much

[Toph @toph_bbq]

I keep discovering the same truths in every game I play.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Been getting the following question a lot:

"How do you create your knowledge graph? How do you map out the topics at the appropriate level of granularity and set the connectivity (prerequisite & encompassing relationships)?"

The answer is actually pretty simple but it tends to frustrate the kinds of people who are always searching for some "secret trick" to avoid work that feels difficult and tedious.

The answer: We do it all manually, entirely by hand.

The secret sauce is really just doing a shit-ton of work to accumulate domain expertise in math and teaching and then doing a shit-ton more work to encode that domain expertise into our knowledge graph structure.

Whenever we plan out a course we take a look at numerous other textbooks and online resources, but ultimately it just comes down to our own best judgement based on our own teaching/tutoring experience and knowledge of the subject matter.

Doing this manually might feel challenging and tedious at the beginning but in my/our experience it comes easier as you gain experience with it.

You just kind of get a "feeling" for what the right chunk size is and what level of detail needs to be addressed within a single chunk.

We've also spent years refining the chunks, sometimes realizing that a chunk needs to be split, and after enough of that we've gotten to the point where we can pull it off really well on the first try.

How about the connectivity? Each of our ~2500 topics has 3-4 knowledge points, and each knowledge point is linked to one or more (typically several) prerequisites. Each prerequisite has an encompassing weight that says what fraction of the prerequisite topic is encompassed, on average, by solving a problem in the post-requisite topic -- in other words, how much "credit" should a simpler topic get for doing an advanced topic where the simpler topic is a component skill.

Yes, that's a lot of connectivity, and yes, we set that manually too. @ninja_maths sets all the prerequisite relationships and I set all the encompassing weights. It was and still is quite a bit of work, but not a prohibitive amount of work. "Right at the edge of human scale" as @exojason likes to say.

By the way, the "edge of human scale" does not mean "the edge of what you can do in a day" or "the edge of when you get tired/bored."

When we were first encoding encompassings into the knowledge graph (after already building up a hefty content base) I spent about 8 hours per day setting encompassings, for a month. No joke, I basically did domain-expert data entry full time for a month:

1500 topics at the time
x 5 prereq relationships per topic
x 2 minutes to estimate the encompassing value for each of those relationships
= 15000 minutes
= 250 hours
~ 8hr/day for 30 days

And yeah, it suuuuuucked! 🤮

But guess what? At the end of that month the task selection model started working really, really well because it had such accurate and comprehensive data to go off of. It was not a fun month but it was 100% worth it.

Like "picking gold off a mountain" (another @exojason phrase) where there's a ton of gold scattered around, and it's tedious to load it up into the wagon and come up and down the mountain, but it's insanely valuable and you'd be an idiot not to just go collect it even if it's not super fun.

In other words... just because something's tedious doesn't mean it's low ROI. Sometimes the highest-ROI things are extremely tedious and you just have to suck it up and do it because it's a sure path to get you to where you need to be in a reasonable time frame.

Okay okay, so the topics and connectivity are created by hand... what about the questions and solutions?

Yeah, those too. By hand.

We also manually estimate a question time for each question type, which we use to help calibrate how much XP each task is worth.

All of our content, metadata, and exercises are created manually in-house, carefully crafted over many years by a team of math experts.

Natural follow-up question: Why generate questions manually instead of algorithmically?

Well, beyond simple arithmetic, there is so much dimensionality and nuance in math questions that generating questions algorithmically would require a custom algorithm for each question type, which would take far longer to build than just biting the bullet and manually generating a sufficiently large pool of questions. Once you create one question of a type, it's pretty easy to clone it and tweak it into new, different questions within the same type.

Furthermore, in our case, a "sufficiently large" pool of questions in each knowledge point does not actually have to be that large: because our students work hyper-efficiently, engaging in minimum effective doses of practice across a highly segmented curriculum, we don't actually need that many questions within each question type to ensure that students are not seeing the same questions over again. About 20 questions per knowledge point is more than sufficient. (A typical course consists of about 500-1,000 knowledge points, requiring a pool of about 10,000-20,000 questions.)

Again, that's right at the edge of human scale. It's definitely too much content for a single person to create, but it's doable when you have a strong content team working hard and efficiently under strong leadership (@ninja_maths).

There was a time in my life when I was attracted to the idea of creating general-purpose solutions to a wide class of problems, but I've come to realize that the real edge -- and, at least for me, the real satisfaction -- typically comes from

1. using your human brain / accumulated experience to grapple with the microstructure of a seemingly intractable problem,

2. finding an exploit that you can pry open just wide enough to shove yourself through with some elbow grease, and

3. doing that over and over again on each successive problem, periodically looking up to see that despite how intractable it seemed at the outset, you're making serious progress in the direction that you're trying to go.

Like Matt Damon in the movie The Martian: "You solve one problem and you solve the next one and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home."

[One Piece Memes @DailyOPMemes]

Anime : One Piece

[ShkShk🐵 @IDontGiveAShk]

My dad has been missing for the last couple of days in Southern South Carolina and is likely not doing so hot

Retweets appreciated, we need to find him

https://t.co/9G3own2UR9

[Lateef 🙃 @LateefSaka]

She is objectively correct. Many are not aware that Germany is responsible for two genocides in the 20th century with the Holocaust being the second, and Herero & Nama the first. We are not taught about the California, Queensland, Moriori, Libyan genocides or the massacre of the Albanians to name a few.

[Dave @notzoso]

Been asked a couple times recently so just putting this out there: I am offering coaching to Melee players, prioritizing locals and people i'm tight with. Rate is $40/hour on a trial basis, if there's interest I'd consider turning it into something more permanent.

[Jalen Brunson @jalenbrunson1]

Let’s have a chat @ReggieMillerTNT @Roommates__Show

[kang @jaycaspiankang]

Best use of AI so far imho

[Dexerto @Dexerto]

NBA superstar Luka Doncic reaches Top 500 rank in Overwatch 2

[Melee Hell @Melee_Hell]

actual canon

[brian @brianonhere]

charles barkley: Now listen these IDF videos they, theyre blowing up empty buildings! they’re putting the blue triangle on there, these buildings empty man, ain’t no Hamas. Meanwhy, these Palanchunians —

Shaq (in tears) These what Chuck

Ernie, tersely: Palestinians. Continue

[joyboy @kingofsnails_]

earnestly believe that @iBDWSSBM will b the undisputed best by the end of 2023

[joyboy @kingofsnails_]

was about to describe what lsd is like to a friend he looked me dead in the eyes and said no spoilers bro

[joyboy @kingofsnails_]

begged ptas not to rank me cuz i havent played in 2 years but he told me i was way too handsome and personable to not be considered top 10 doesnt seem fair to me but oh well guess i gotta hold that

[Magnus Carlsen @MagnusCarlsen]

Potential free agent for PogChamps 5 commentary? @LudwigAhgren

[Le couleur vert @Satchmo18442793]

@Just__Pokey You gave off this kind of energy. Listen, you think you know what we want to do, until we do(n't) ;)

[Rico Gates @TrustSwisho]

Nigga gave Michael Jordan an ECF trophy