[Funny] Even Clippy can be blamed on the use of non-Bayesian methods

lukeprog

From this 2001 article:

Eric Horvitz... feels bad about [Microsoft Office's Clippy]... many people regard the paperclip as annoyingly over-enthusiastic, since it appears without warning and gets in the way.

To be fair, that is not Dr Horvitz's fault. Originally, he programmed the paperclip to use Bayesian decision-making techniques both to determine when to pop up, and to decide what advice to offer...

The paperclip's problem is that the algorithm... that determined when it should appear was deemed too cautious. To make the feature more prominent, a cruder non-Bayesian algorithm was substituted in the final product, so the paperclip would pop up more often.

Ever since, Dr Horvitz has wondered whether he should have fought harder to keep the original algorithm.

I, at least, found this amusing.

From this 2001 article:

Eric Horvitz... feels bad about [Microsoft Office's Clippy]... many people regard the paperclip as annoyingly over-enthusiastic, since it appears without warning and gets in the way.

To be fair, that is not Dr Horvitz's fault. Originally, he programmed the paperclip to use Bayesian decision-making techniques both to determine when to pop up, and to decide what advice to offer...

The paperclip's problem is that the algorithm... that determined when it should appear was deemed too cautious. To make the feature more prominent, a cruder non-Bayesian algorithm was substituted in the final product, so the paperclip would pop up more often.

Ever since, Dr Horvitz has wondered whether he should have fought harder to keep the original algorithm.

I, at least, found this amusing.

Personally, I think it's a little disturbing that the post's karma fell from ~35 to ~25 since you posted this. I would have thought LWers generally put more thought into their votes than that.

(A consistent effect. Comments about karma are powerful. People seem rather malleable.)

6JoshuaZ15y

I withdrew my vote after jsalvatier made his comment. It made me think more about it, and the fact that I have a general problem with voting too often for things that are funny instead of things that genuinely help the signal to noise ratio. I also saw the extremely high total vote as worrisome. If the vote had at the time been +10 or +15 or so I might not have felt as much of a need to withdraw my vote. I suspect that similar thought processes occurred with other people.

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[Funny] Even Clippy can be blamed on the use of non-Bayesian methods

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[Funny] Even Clippy can be blamed on the use of non-Bayesian methods

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