Siyu Zhou and team win AI competition

Group member Siyu Zhou and his team recently took first place in the Commentator Category of the AI world cup. The goal of the competition was to create an artificial intelligence designed to act as commentator of the world cup games played between competing artificial intelligences. However, since the data generating process was known, Siyu and the team realized that no model trained on the data would outperform the data itself (a result familiar to AI practitioners). Thus, they hard coded their "artificial intelligence" using a series of if/then statements. According to Siyu:

"We entered the competition for commentators in good faith, starting with data collection and building state of the art neural networks. But, we soon realized the model, which was trained to learn the distribution of the data, would never outperform the data generating script itself with well defined rules. We joked that winning the competition using our hard coded script would troll the organizers and all other contestants, so we went ahead and submitted it. It turned out ironically dramatic."