Nat Friedman: belief

Transcript context

…Why did you decide to do it in the form of a prize, rather than just like giving a grant to the team that was already pursuing it, or maybe some other team that wants to take it out? We talked about that. But I think what we basically concluded was the search space of different ways you could solve this is pretty big. And we just wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. Having a contest means lots of people are going to try lots of things and you know, someone's gonna figure it out quickly. Many eyes may make it shallow as a task. I think that's the main thing. Probably someone could do it but I think this will just be a lot more efficient. And it's fun too. I think it's interesting to do a contest and who knows who will solve it or how? People may not even use machine learning. We think that's the most likely approach for recognizing the ink but they may find some other approach that we haven't thought of. One question people might have is that you have these visible fragments mapped out. Do we expect them to correspond to the burned off or the ashen carbonized scrolls that you can do machine learning on? Ground truth of one could correspond to the other?…

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