[HN Gopher] Using computer vision to help win $1M in Mountain De...
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       Using computer vision to help win $1M in Mountain Dew's Super Bowl
       contest
        
       Author : rocauc
       Score  : 120 points
       Date   : 2021-02-08 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.roboflow.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.roboflow.com)
        
       | Exuma wrote:
       | It missed ones on license plate
        
         | yeldarb wrote:
         | Good catch; someone on YouTube called this out this morning and
         | we released an updated dataset (we had also missed the ones
         | attached to the wheels): https://public.roboflow.com/object-
         | detection/mountain-dew-co...
         | 
         | Really hoping someone uses this to win the contest!
        
       | Someone wrote:
       | I would guess the best strategy for this is to simply make an
       | educated guess, soon.
       | 
       | There likely will be way more competitors (at least a hundred
       | thousand, I would guess) than possible halfway decent guesses
       | (maybe a few thousand?), and it's first past the post, so having
       | the correct answer isn't enough; you have to beat the other
       | correct answers.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | When I was 8 I won a 72 pound pumpkin by randomly guessing "72"
         | in a "guess how much this pumpkin weighs" contest. I vaguely
         | remember eating pumpkin things for a long time thereafter. Not
         | sure how my mother felt about it.
        
       | haecceity wrote:
       | Well if you've already annotated all the bottles in the video
       | then why do you need to train a model to do it?
        
         | blantonl wrote:
         | to catch the ones that were invariably missed due to optical
         | illusions etc.
        
           | shmageggy wrote:
           | And un-count the ones that appear in more than one scene, as
           | mentioned in the article
        
           | ddalex wrote:
           | wouldn't it also count reflections, for example, which are
           | not real bottles to be counted ?
        
             | cbo100 wrote:
             | That's where I think they are going to use their discretion
             | to "pick" the winner, despite somebody else having been
             | just as correct.
             | 
             | For instance, they say the one he is holding in one scene
             | isn't counted again in a later scene.
             | 
             | What about the reflection in his sunglasses? Is that 1 or 2
             | (or 3 if you count the source of the reflection wherever
             | that is).
        
             | bikezen wrote:
             | Rules specifically say reflections are counted, even
             | calling out an example of reflections in sunglasses would
             | count as additional bottles.
        
       | klmadfejno wrote:
       | I thought this was the best ad of the superbowl. Probably the
       | only one I actually remember. I've heard a lot of people say the
       | commercials have gotten worse over time, but I think it's
       | actually just that we hate commercials a lot more than we used
       | to.
       | 
       | One thing I really hate which is growing in superbowl commercial
       | ethos is the advent of meta commercials, and expanded cinematic
       | universe commercials.
       | 
       | On the other hand, the superbowl is the only event I watch for an
       | entire year that has actual TV-style commercials anymore.
        
         | okprod wrote:
         | I liked the Edgar Scissorhands commercial the most, followed by
         | this one. The Reddit commercial was good, too. I thought most
         | of the commercials were pretty awful this year.
        
           | jamiek88 wrote:
           | There's no accounting for taste! I thought the scissor hands
           | one was cringe worthy ! Weird us humans.
        
           | ashtonkem wrote:
           | The paralympian swimmer ad made me tear up a little bit.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | turtlebits wrote:
       | The title is missing a key word "help". The prize doesn't appear
       | to have been won yet- not sure if the original article changed
       | their title.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Ok, we've put help in the title above.
        
           | rocauc wrote:
           | I was character limited - thank you
        
       | joering2 wrote:
       | Don't the rules of this content disqualify something like this?
        
       | surfacenexus wrote:
       | You even caught the bottles reflected in the sunglasses,
       | incredible!
        
         | yeldarb wrote:
         | Totally; the model does a good job finding what you teach it to
         | find!
         | 
         | On the flip side, someone in the YouTube comments mentioned
         | that we missed the ones on the wheels and license plates. So I
         | added them to the dataset this morning and kicked off another
         | train job.
        
         | meowster wrote:
         | Are those two seperate bottles being reflected once, or one
         | bottle being reflected twice?
        
           | beervirus wrote:
           | Good question. And do they count as separate bottles if the
           | un-reflected version is shown in a different frame?
        
       | alasdair_ wrote:
       | Alternate idea: create a bot to open new twitter accounts and
       | tweet ever increasing numbers until you win.
       | 
       | EDIT: Bonus points if you use another bot to exclude all guesses
       | that have already been submitted by others.
        
         | mulmen wrote:
         | This was my first thought.
         | 
         | Also, I didn't read the fine print but do you even need to
         | create a new Twitter account? Do the rules say one guess per
         | customer? All I see is "Tweet us the correct number."
        
           | oplav wrote:
           | Here's the fine print. One account per participant.
           | 
           | > NO PURCH. NEC. Begins when Sponsor Tweets this commercial
           | on Sponsor's timeline at https://Twitter.com/MountainDew (no
           | earlier than 2/7/21) and ends when a verifiable entrant
           | Tweets the correct number of Mtn Dew Major Melon bottles,
           | regular or Zero Sugar, (including 3D, drawn, neon, metallic &
           | any color) that appear in this commercial or 3/31/21,
           | whichever comes first. Limit one Twitter account allowed per
           | participant. Winner must be verified. Subject to complete
           | Official Rules, at lifechangingDEW.com. Open to legal res of
           | 50 US/DC, 18+ (19+ in NE&AL). Potential winner subject to
           | background check per Official Rules. Void where prohibited.
           | To Enter, visit Twitter.com/MountainDew. Sponsor: Pepsi-Cola
           | Company, 1111 Westchester Avenue, White Plains, New York, NY
           | 10604. The NFL Entities have not offered or sponsored this
           | promotion in any way.
        
             | schoen wrote:
             | Maybe you could put together a syndicate of 1,000 people
             | who coordinate to tweet increasing numbers over a short
             | timeframe based on a rough estimate, and then split the
             | prize? (Of course, that would be pretty logistically
             | complicated, including the timing and getting all the
             | people to trust each other.)
        
               | mulmen wrote:
               | Known in game theory circles as Cena Equilibrium.
        
           | google234123 wrote:
           | I'm 99% sure there will be some human input on the final
           | selection. Probably will be biased towards an account that's
           | active and a little popular.
        
             | mulmen wrote:
             | Yeah I was imagining some kind of Pepsi Point Harrier Jet
             | loophole.
        
           | zamadatix wrote:
           | > Also, I didn't read the fine print but...
           | 
           | It's disqualified in the fine print.
        
             | mulmen wrote:
             | "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."
        
             | markdown wrote:
             | "Always read the fine print, but don't bother with the
             | EULA" - Rudy Giuliani
        
             | WalterBright wrote:
             | The reason for that fine print is:
             | 
             | http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes
             | _...
        
         | cortesoft wrote:
         | You would be disqualified for using more than one account.
        
           | postalrat wrote:
           | Only if you get caught.
        
             | dawnerd wrote:
             | Says they'll do a background check. For a million bucks you
             | bet they'll figure it out.
        
       | skanga wrote:
       | Not familiar with Roboflow. Is it something like OpenCV as a
       | service?
        
         | rocauc wrote:
         | We make developer tools for computer vision so engineers can
         | create models without being machine learning experts: collect
         | data, organize images, annotate, train, deploy, and improve.
        
           | fxtentacle wrote:
           | That is a very bad pitch. I'm doing computer vision all day
           | long but I still don't know what service you offer and/or if
           | it might help me.
        
             | chrischen wrote:
             | I'd imagine if it's targeted at non ML experts then it
             | wouldn't be of much help to you,
        
               | skanga wrote:
               | It should still be UNDERSTANDABLE to ML experts even if
               | they are not the target customer.
               | 
               | IMO Making your pitch non-understandable is just a bad
               | idea ...
        
             | ksm1717 wrote:
             | Founder responds by chance to comment on random third party
             | thread with a quick explanation.
             | 
             | You: "very bad pitch"
             | 
             | Wouldn't life be great if every comment was an ad?
        
             | meibo wrote:
             | Maybe that's your experience because you're into the
             | matter, for me, judging from the screenshots and
             | explanation, it seems like Scratch-like/no-code CV which
             | seems pretty cool.
        
               | fxtentacle wrote:
               | I was referring purely to the text pitch here on HN.
        
               | rocauc wrote:
               | Ah, yeah, that one liner resonates with teams
               | establishing their vision infra. Teams build production
               | vision models in the span of an afternoon with better
               | tools, e.g. one dev built this Mountain Dew bottle model
               | during Super Bowl half time.
               | 
               | Some ML engineers find value in things like automated
               | annotation, testing model architectures
               | (models.roboflow.com), and having one-click deploy for
               | custom object detection APIs. Think of it like replacing
               | all the one-off scripts so you can focus on your domain-
               | specific problems instead of reinventing the wheel on
               | vision infrastructure.
        
       | WalterBright wrote:
       | This is a modern version of the 1975 Caltech Sweepstakes caper. I
       | think that was the first use of a computer to enter a
       | sweepstakes.
       | 
       | http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes_...
        
       | randompwd wrote:
       | Their annotation methodology is flawed:
       | 
       | From the rules: > Correct Bottle Count will include bottles shown
       | from the cap/top of the bottle to the bottom of Mountain Dew
       | label
       | 
       | Also, I'm pretty sure it thinks John Cena's right ear is a bottle
       | -\\_(tsu)_/-
        
       | kawfey wrote:
       | Another trick would be to take the average (excluding outliers)
       | of as many guesses as possible since they're all on twitter. The
       | Wisdom of the Crowd should get very close.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd
        
         | Exuma wrote:
         | It seems that would be weighted however towards a too-low count
         | of bottles
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-08 23:00 UTC)