#167: The Ol' College Try
Arthur Trope Presents: The Inscrutables
No. 167
“The Ol’ College Try”
Slothrop did it. He found the bug in the Slater-Miyazaki Caption Scoring System. He must’ve pulled an all-nighter, bc first thing Mon morning, he walked the Committee through it. After he’d filled the whiteboard, he started to draw on the conf room window, and then had to bring in one of those easels with the big sheets of paper. In the end, it turns out the problem was with the model’s input variables. Slater & Miyazaki had weighted it: one-third humor, one-fifth image balance, one-eighth topicality, and one-quarter inscrutability. The problem, which seems obvious in hindsight, is that these fractions only add up to 90.8%. So the missing 9.2% in the final denominator had the effect of degrading the model with each iteration, until it descended into a meaningless void. At least that’s how I interpret the mtg notes. After a sigh of relief that the model could be fixed (either by spreading the 9.2% across the existing variables or adding a 5th variable, which is what they did), the realization set in that we would have to run every panel to-date, along with all of the alternative captions, back through the new S-MCSS process to see what’s what. That’s not a proposition anyone’s looking forward to and presents a host of potential problems. But we’ll worry about that tomorrow. For now, Slothrop is basking in the glow of his presentation. Krenshaw motioned to rename the algorithm the “Slothrop Caption Scoring System” (Slo-CapSS), but Slothrop demurred. Hard to say if he was being humble or playing hard to get. I haven’t quite figured the guy out yet, but I’m open to the idea he might not be as bad as I thought. Maybe. The 5th variable btw is concision, which feels like a knee-jerk reaction to Artie’s recent tendency toward long, rambling captions. I told Artie about Slothrop’s weekend in the office & he cooked up #167. It scored a 7.1 on the old system and a 7.2 on the new system. That’s only one data point, so premature to conclude the change didn’t make much difference. But I guess we’ll find out when we re-run the whole bloody canon. -Ed.
