Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 15:55:00 -0500
From: Charles Sutton 
To: social@cs.umass.edu
Subject: TEA in the Atrium in 5 minutes

Many of you expressed interest in the decision tree classifier that I had
planned to use to determine what exactly are the attributes that predict a
fine departmental TEA.  I have bad news.  I'm afraid that effort had failed.
There was just massive overfitting.  The trees generated had over 10000
leaves, and this was with only ten data points.

So I've decided to take a more direct approach.  At TEA today you'll notice a
small button next to the milk.  This button commands a device that will
deliver a small electric shock to the TEA totallers.  If any aspect of the TEA
fails to satisfy you, press away.  Then, it will be up to us to try to
discover a policy for running TEAs that minimizes the shock.  In this way, we
hope to provide only the finest service to you, the customer.

TEA this week is sponsored by Andy Barto and the Autonomous Learning
Laboratory.

Sincerely,

  Your obedient savants,

    The TEA totallers,

      Laylaa Ali and Charles Sutton

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