SmileyNet -- Towards the Prediction of the Lottery by Reading Tea Leaves with AI

Abstract

We introduce SmileyNet, a novel neural network with psychic abilities. It is inspired by the fact that a positive mood can lead to improved cognitive capabilities including classification tasks. The network is hence presented in a first phase with smileys and an encouraging loss function is defined to bias it into a good mood. SmileyNet is then used to forecast the flipping of a coin based on an established method of Tasseology, namely by reading tea leaves. Training and testing in this second phase are done with a high-fidelity simulation based on real-world pixels sampled from a professional tea-reading cup. SmileyNet has an amazing accuracy of 72% to correctly predict the flip of a coin. Resnet-34, respectively YOLOv5 achieve only 49%, respectively 53%. It is then shown how multiple SmileyNets can be combined to win the lottery.

This is a satirical accumulation of misconceptions, mistakes, and flawed reasoning I have encountered in recent times as a reviewer and sometimes even as a reader of published papers. I hope it is entertaining and useful in the context of the education of BSc, MSc, and PhD students in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Science