akrish

This past weekend, Mr. Yuk travelled to Gambier, Ohio for our first tournament of the 2011-2012 season. With just a few practices under our belts and since we hadn’t made any cuts yet, we went as a split squad, with two fairly balanced teams. I’m still injured, but I hung out mostly with CMU X, so I didn’t get to see too much of the other half of our team. This means that this recap will be predominantly about the squad I watched.

Results-wise, both teams did really well. Both teams went 4-3 on the weekend and X took 3rd place only behind the two Penn State teams. Y did a bit worse on Saturday, so they ended up in the 7th place bracket on Sunday. They won out the bracket to finish 7th out of 12 teams.

As I mentioned, this was a tryout tournament, so we focused on the basics, namely cutting, dump-swing, and hard man defense. While there were a lot of things that needed fixing, I was very impressed with how the rookies and younger players performed and, in particular, how so many players improved tremendously over the course of the weekend.

My squad did several things really well. Specifically, I liked how many of our rookies played within themselves on offense, and decided to dump the disc to veteran handlers rather than make tougher upfield throws. I also really liked many aspects of our handler defense; we earned several turnovers because we prevented easy resets. Lastly, our upfield cutting looked pretty decent (especially for a first tournament) with good timing on the cuts and good cutting structure (hard deep, hard underneath). This was especially true of our veteran players although our rookies did a decent job of this as well.

That being said, there were definitely many things that we need to work on. Most salient was conditioning. We played five games on Saturday and by the third, it was obvious that we were getting fatigued. Cuts were slower and less frequent, defense let up, and we made more and more mental mistakes. This is a huge problem, especially as we have been a team that wins games on defense with our legs. Of course it is early on the season so I’m confident that we’ll build our endurance and be prepared come spring. Other things that could be worked on include: defending up-line dump cuts, general downfield defense (positioning, footwork, intensity), reading discs (especially deep throws), and as always throwing and catching.

Lastly, I was really happy that we had many close games that we managed to win. X had close games against both Case Western teams (one of them ended in universe point) and another universe point win against Michigan State while Y had a u-point win against Akron and a u-point loss to Case. We also had a couple of come-from-behind wins that were really exciting. Last year, we weren’t very good at finishing close games or fighting while behind, so I was really excited about these results.

We’ll be making our first round of cuts soon, and then taking the A-team tryouts to Hucks off the Hilltop in October. I’m looking forward to a great (hopefully successful) season!

Yesterday I had a discussion with two of my friends about why we, as researchers, choose to work on the problems we work on. In statistics and machine learning, and maybe more generally in computer science, this can be a pretty interesting question. Do we work on problems purely for personal interest? Or do we require that problems have some well-thought-out practical application?

This is a philosophical question that I think is fairly unique to computer science and machine learning. In disciplines like biology, there is no question that applications are necessary motivation for a research problem. On the other hand, in pure math, it seems like applications are independent of problem choice; it’s nice if research is practice in nature, but it’s not necessary. CS and ML research is interesting, because in many respects it is only loosely motivated by application, and often it is more about developing theoretical results rather than demonstrating practicality. This is particularly true of the research that I have been doing recently in statistical machine learning.

The discussion went something like this: person A advocates working on things because they are interesting to him, while person B advocates having some grounding in reality before delving into a research problem. Person B at first claimed that the problems are interesting to the academic community only if they are practically motivated. As a counter, person B mentions the centuries of mathematical results (i.e. number theory, etc.) that only years later become “useful.” Clearly, these researchers were motivated by interest. Person B then asked why person A worked at all, and person B responded that he enjoys the problems he works on, mostly because they are interesting. The three of us then started talking about this in more detail, with focus on statistical machine learning problems.

Yesterday, we didn’t reach a conclusion on what was the right thing to do. I was tending toward choose problems based on interest. Assuming you have some sense of what has been going on in the community, your view on what is interesting and what isn’t should at least somewhat match the view of the community. If you feel a problem is interesting, my bets are that many other people feel that way, and for this reason it is a reasonable problem to work on.

I chatted with person B again today about this subject, and he brought up two interesting points. First, it is unlikely that you will get funding to work on problems that are not practically motivated. While this is probably true later in life, graduate school is exactly for this purpose. You get paid to work on the things that you find interesting, it doesn’t matter whether they’re well-motivated or not. Even later on, I think there is an art to making your work sound relevant and convincing people that it is worth their funding, and even with grants, I believe you have some flexibility to work on problems that interest you.

His second point was that working on obscure problems that no one cares about is not productive, even if you find it personally interesting. For example, if you take a well-known problem, modify it slightly, and rederive results for the modification, it isn’t interesting unless the modification you made is well motivated. I agreed with him on this point; I don’t really consider it research to walk through calculations for subtly different problems. There has to be something novel to the modified problem. On the other hand, if you took an obscure problem, and came up with some elegant, novel solution, that would be interesting and useful. Additionally, if you worked on an obscure problem, but came up with intermediary results that could be applicable elsewhere (for example new concentration inequalities), I would also say that is useful.

So after thinking about this for a couple of days here is where I stand. A research problem is worth working on (read: I would work on a problem) if: 1) you find it interesting, 2) it is practically motivated, 3) you believe that other researchers will be interested in your results (whether or not is it practically motivated), 4) You believe there are intermediary consequences, lemmas, or results that will be widely useful, or 5) You believe there is something elegant about the problem and its solution (i.e. the solution is not mechanical). To me (1) is necessary, and at least one of two through five are required.

My first trip to the club series (on a real club team) started this weekend as Dire Wolf travelled to New Jersey for the sectional tournament. Just before leaving on Friday afternoon, I saw a physical therapist and was diagnosed with shoulder impingement, so I didn’t end up playing, which was unfortunate. Nevertheless, Dire Wolf took care of business, finishing 3rd overall and qualifying for regionals.

We came into the tournament seeded second in a 5-team pool, behind Oakland. We were really looking forward to games against Oakland (Pittsburgh rivals), Southpaw (Philly elite team) and Bear Proof, who beat us in a close game at NY invite. Southpaw and Bear Proof were both in the other pool, so on saturday we took care of business with the lower seeded teams (beating Clockwork Orange 13-4, Misogyny 13-6, and Hypnotoad 13-4). For the last round of the game we faced Oakland for the fourth time this season.

Oakland (Game 1): Dire Wolf pulled to start, and immediately broke to take a quick 1-0 lead. We traded points to 4s, where oakland eventually broke back, and finally took half 7-5. In the second half, Oakland opened with a string of breaks and eventually beat us convincingly, with a score of 13-6. Wolf played really well in the first half, forcing errant throws and a lot of 50-50 balls from Oakland, but we had a hard time earning turnovers off of these (they had at least two forced throws that could have easily resulted in turnovers). Even still, we generated turnovers, but failed to convert once we got the disc. After Oakland ironed out their kinks, they played a much more consistent game, and we started making more mistakes on offense, allowing them to run away with the game. With this loss, we finished second in our pool and qualified for semifinals on sunday.

Southpaw: Again we came out strong, earning a quick break and taking a 2-1 lead. Southpaw broke back after a couple of traded points to tie the game at 4s with Dire Wolf on D. Stifling dump defense by Greeno and Skylar resulting in a high-stall forced throw and a turnover and we broke again with a big huck from Tad to Karl for the score. Southpaw came back strong and a couple of miscues by our offense resulted in two breaks for Southpaw, to take half 8-6. After half, though we didn’t roll over like we did in the Oakland game, but managed to get back on serve at 9s capitalizing on some of their miscues. Unfortunately, that’s where the journey ends, as Southpaw got their act together and broke several times to win 15-10.

Southpaw is supposed to be one of the stronger teams in our region, and while we knew we could compete with them, I think we were all pretty excited about this result. I hope we play them again at regionals.

Bear Proof: We dropped into the third place game where we played Bear Proof, from central PA. I don’t have too much to say about this game. Hungry for revenge from NY invite, we came out really strong and went up 5-1 right away. We took half 8-2 and eventually took the game to 13-4, game to 15. At this point we knew we had pretty much won the game but it would be nice to bring it home convincingly. Unfortunately, we let bear proof run off a string of breaks and bring the game to 13-7, with the soft cap on. The last point was epically long with a slew of turnovers by both teams that ended in a bear proof score, but the hard cap gave us the win 13-8. Again we came out really strong, but slowed down in the second half, and if the game were closer to begin with, we would have let Bear Proof back into the game towards the end. Going from 13-4 to 13-8 is pretty much unacceptable, and a better team would have punished us for slipping in the second half. At any rate, with this victory, we proceeded to the second place game, a rematch against Oakland Ultimate.

Oakland (Game 2): The theme of the weekend for Dire Wolf was a strong start to close games. The same is true of this game, with us earning a break and making it 2-1 right away. We traded to 4-3, when Oakland ran off a string of breaks to take half at 5-8. Unlike the last time, we didn’t roll over after half, score our O point and the next to D points to make it 9-8. However, once Oakland converted their O point, the rolled off a couple of breaks and eventually won 15-11. This game got pretty out of hand, with a lot of arguing, aggressive marks and fouls, and a lot of disc spiking. However, it was also really exciting to watch, as it stayed pretty close throughout, and the lead shifted back and forth a couple of times. Both teams played well, and if we can stay focused for the entire game, I think we could come away with a win against these guys.

Closing Thoughts: I think the theme of this weekend is focus and consistency. In all of the games I talked about, we gave up a lot of points (and often the game) really late in the game. We’ve proven that we can play with some of the best teams in our region, but we need to be able to do that for the whole game, not just for the first half or first three quarters. I don’t believe this is an endurance issue, but rather an lack of mental focus towards the end of the game, as a lot of our turnovers seem to come from bad decisions and mistakes rather than fatigue. If we can figure out how to stay consistent for a duration of a game (and really the entire tournament) then I truly believe that we have a shot at nationals. It’s going to be tough, but I definitely think it’s possible.