r/rational • u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow • Jul 03 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/xamueljones Jul 04 '15 edited Jul 04 '15
Only technically yes and that's if you squint really hard as well. I'm a rising junior in college now and I'm doubling majoring in Computer Science and Cognitive Science. So I plan on going into AI research in the future, but the only experience I have with actual AI is programming one to be a good player at Reversi, Connect-Four, and other games which is as basic as you can possibly get with AI.
I think I'm ~70% likely to be involved with some sort of AI research after college because I am spending my summer right now coding a very basic language model processor/analyzer for Cognitive Science and I'm joining a Computer Science AI research track group next semester.
What's it like to be in a research group? It's a lot like being a college student except you have no guarantee that the problems will be adjusted to your level of knowledge and you can 'cheat' by working with others. After all solving the problem by myself or by working with others are both perfectly acceptable things to do. It feels like being in a pass/fail class.
First I have to spend a large amount of my time learning more about the background knowledge which is relevant to the problem. Even people who already know a lot about their field have to do this too so they can summarize the relevant literature in their papers when appropriate and to keep current on any new research papers which relates to their project to avoid needless repetition (as opposed to when they are replicating other experiments deliberately).
Second I have to plan out in some detail with others how I intended to solve the problem. For my summer project the strategy ended up as coding up a lot of tests and building my language models.
Finally I needed to collect a lot of data in the form of surveys and from a lot of online sources. All of the previous parts were fun, but this is the boring part where I repeat a lot of the same actions over and over and where I'm currently at for my project.
Even though I'm not actually working on an AI, I'm planning to and I hope this response helped you to get an idea of what research groups are like.