Saturday Citation: Irrational modeling; Genetic basis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); Tasmanian devils remain endangered

Hello, interested parties. (This is a non-gendered term I’ve been discussing because I see “people” in too many social media posts.) Researchers this week reported an artificial intelligence model that attempts to mimic human non-gendered speech in decision-making. Rationally, the model must be the best way to construct general artificial intelligence equivalent to humans, right? For example, if you say “thank you” to Siri and she replies “you too” instead of “you’re welcome,” then you’ll feel awkward. To me, this seems very human.

Plus, here are some links to reports on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its genetic basis, the still-endangered Tasmanian devil, and previously unknown biases in student assessments that could scare famous people A student named Ybarra or Zamboni.

Arrested for irrationality

Human decision-making is inherently irrational and largely unpredictable as people attempt to balance incoming information, goal-directed behavior, predictions about the future, and irrelevant internal drives (e.g., desire for tacos craving for bread). AI researchers are now trying to build AI systems that can more effectively work with irrational, skull-bound humans by accounting for this irrationality.

Researchers at MIT and the University of Washington are reporting on a new technique that models the behavior of an agent, whether human or artificial intelligence, to account for the limits of its problem-solving abilities.

Previous research attempts at modeling human decision-making have involved adding noise to the model so that the agent only selects the correct option in a certain proportion of trials. But human irrationality is not always irrational in the same way. Instead, the new model is inspired by high-level chess players. Researchers noticed that higher-skilled players spent more time thinking before participating in challenging matches. This proved to be a good representation of human behavior and inspired their new framework.

The model runs an algorithm for a period of time to solve a specific problem. The model compares the algorithm’s decisions to the behavior of an agent working on the same problem; it can then combine the agent’s decisions with those of the algorithm and determine exactly where the agent stops its plan. Deriving an inference budget from the agent’s plan enables the model to predict how the agent will make choices for similar problems.

Study big

Exposure to traumatic environments or conditions, such as battlefields, activates stress responses that may be adaptive and improve human survival. In post-traumatic stress disorder, the same reactions can impair quality of life, especially in a country going through two decades of continuous war. (Obviously, there are other causes of PTSD, too.)

A recent genetic study of 1.2 million people by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard identified 95 genomic locations associated with the development of PTSD after trauma, as well as 43 genes associated with PTSD. This study is the largest of its kind and provides several new research targets that may help develop prevention and treatment strategies.

Zbigniew is underrated

Researchers at the University of Michigan reported that students whose last names were lower in alphabetical order had lower grades than students whose last names were higher in alphabetical order. Haha, it gets worse: Alphabetical students also received more negative, less polite comments, and had lower quality ratings as measured by student complaints. The results come from an analysis of data from the online learning management system Canvas, which is designed to sort student submissions alphabetically by last name.

During the evaluation period, students with surnames starting with A, B, C, D or E improved their scores by 0.3 points from 2014 to 2022; students with suburban surnames scored 0.3 points lower, a gap of 0.6 points. Researchers speculate that fatigue, not alphabetical order, is the real problem.

“We suspect that fatigue is one of the main factors responsible for this effect, because when you work on something for a long time, you get tired and then you start to lose focus and your cognitive abilities suffer. ” said Pei Jiaxin, a researcher at the University of Michigan School of Information.

The findings were denied

At one point, some Australian friends told me that it would be fun to introduce the Tasmanian Devil to Americans because we don’t usually understand that Warner Bros. cartoon characters are based on real animals. (Australians, on the other hand, are fully aware that Bugs Bunny is based on the rabbit, and Australia has built continent-wide fences for it.) Like the cartoon character, the real Tasmanian Devil is squat, smelly, noisy. They are highly endangered, threatened by a contagious cancer that causes huge tumors to form on their faces, ultimately making it difficult for the devils to eat.

In 2020, researchers tracking devil’s facial tumor disease reported that the disease’s spread had slowed and stabilized; now, however, a multi-institutional research team has put those claims to rest in a new genotyping study Challenge, discovering errors in the data on which the original team based its conclusions.

2024 Science