This post is by Lizzie
As February draws to an end, so does your chance to enter the Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition! We challenge you to predict the bloom date of cherry trees at five locations throughout the world for cash and swag prizes. Entries are due Friday.
This year, contestants will not only compete against each other for the top prizes–but against artificial intelligence. We will include one or more submissions from the most popular large language models. Our AI handlers will prompt the AI with the contest rules and the entries from previous competitions. The handlers will then execute any code written by the AI as part of their entry. Judges will review all entries without knowing which were submitted by humans and which were written by AI.
Any human that beats the AI will receive commemorative memorabilia indicating they “beat the bot in the 2025 International Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition.”
Weird that there is no wikipedia entry on Liestal-Weideli, and a google search seems to only pull up entries related to the cherry blossom contest. There *is* a wikipedia entry on Liestal, which appears to be what is being referred to (at least, they are both in Switzerland). But no entry on Weideli. What’s up with that?
I see ‘Weideli’ added to multiple town names in Switzerland, so I will have to ask what it is exactly pinpointing next time I am meeting with the Swiss Meteo people.
Weideli seems to be the particular area in Liestal where those cherry trees have been observed since 1894.
https://search.ch/map/Liestal,Weideli
“Liestal” is the name of the city, while “Weideli” is the subdivision/neighborhood where these trees are located. “Weideli” can have multiple meanings, most often “forest” or, as adjective, “admirable.” Not sure which exact meaning is appropriate here, though.
The link to the competition is not working.
Apologies for this; it’s super weird as it’s always fine for me, but we have had issues on other machines (and always in the US, but maybe just sampling bias there). I updated the link to the rules page, which seems more stable.
I wanted to put in the default “my prediction for this year is the dates of the blossom last year”, but it insists that I have a github repo with my code in it.
Why not go with the mean over the last 5-10 instead? (Or over the period of the competition, so three years of data for all sites.)
My SO reports that the cherry blossoms are expected to be on the late side this year in Tokyo, but the (always pre-cherrry) flowering plums are out.
Here, as a joke, I acquired a new (to me used copy of an in-production) lens* that uses the exact same structure/optical design as the original 1896 Zeiss Planar, and took it out for a walk in the neighborhood. Start at the link below, click “next” (upper right or center bottom) until you run out, then stop, for some snaps with said lens that include a few of said flowering plums. (The first two are from my back yard, the rest from the neighborhood.)
https://pbase.com/davidjl/image/175276703
*: For nerds: The Zeiss Loxia 50/2.0, mfd. by a very strange Japanese company, Cosina, whose CEO is a Leica fan and produces an extensive line of oddball (and seriously superb) lenses for Leica and Sony cameras (and more recently, Nikon and Canon as well).