Slashdot Mirror
Google Image Labeler
vandalman writes to tell us that Google is betting on the obsessive compulsive need for many users to see big numbers next to their name with a new beta service called Google Image Labeler. From the description: "You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you've seen and the websites where those images were found. And we'll show you the points you've earned throughout the session."
This is indeed a creative way to enhance the search results. Some of the pictures could be a little bit larger though.. Or some kind of a mouse-over which shows a larger picture.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
its just taken me 4 minutes to accumulate ~1000 points, there are people who have accumulated 190000 points.
Thats playing the google game solidly for around 12 hours (less if they are good).
Congrats to those people!
As for myself, I found the image sizes too small, but I suppose we are basing the keywords on first impressions and are expected to come from the image search.
I found myself squinting to see what it was meant to be and wasting time, even if it was just 2x larger (scaled would do, no real need for more data) I would spend time there, its actually quite fun especially since you are aiming to get more than your random competitor.
liqbase
And those points will get me what?
Looks like Google is running out of names for their new Beta products. GoogleWhatever doesn't seem to be cutting it anymore.
I wonder, will they provide an option for only labeling porn images?
- These characters were randomly selected.
It looks like google just created a clone of the ESP Game.
This sig cannot be proven true.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/research.html has the papers and http://www.peekaboom.org/ is the game implementation.
My first thought about this is that Google is getting people to come up with metatag data for them by making a game out of it.
There needs to be a way to make the images larger, I can hardly see some of them!
First Google Trends, and now this service. They may seem to be valueless business models, but I suspect Google is getting some very interesting data from the people who play the game and access the service. At the least it's fodder for psychology papers. At best I think Google will be using the data to refine its search engine and help target ads.
I went to this site. I was paired with someone, then presented with my image. It was one I recognised, the 'broken image link' glyph. I tagged 'broken' and '404' among other things.
I didn't get one tag in common with my partner!
The pool of images is pretty small (or at least it was yesterday). A couple sites keep popping up (pictures of the aurora borealis, pictures of various galaxies and nebulae from NASA, etc.). The most annoying of these is a site with some time-lapse photos of the construction of the ATLAS experiment at CERN. The pictures show what looks like a construction site, with some blue-painted metal, and a large circular hole in one of the walls. You could figure out what it is by following the link below the photo after you're done playing the game. Just bypassing that step to hopefully reduce a little frustration :) IT'S "ATLAS" or "CERN"!!! Hopefully your partner will know that too.
BTW, just wanted to point out that a good way to jump up the rankings is to get a partner who agrees with you to label every picture "foo", regardless of its contents.
Doesn't Google already use Content Based Image Retrieval anyways for their image search? If so, why would they need to attach a bunch of metadata to each image?
Points mean PRIZES!
because i always get bored and type boobies and when i google image for boobies i dont want to see all this other shit
I'm not sure why... Google's brilliance shines through again.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Technically google didn't rip of the ESP game. From this article http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060901-0943 09 It seems Google officially licensed the game.
It's like the $20,000 Pyramid gameshow, but without the $20,000.
Didn't Google just buy a company involved in image recognition and AI search. They are trying to improve the searching feature in Picasa to make it more intelligent and actually understand what's in your photos (ie. are there buildings or people, and who exactly are they?)
Maybe this Image Labeler will be a part of some genetic program or neural network, etc...
As long as Charles Nelson Riley isn't my partner (not that there's anything wrong with that...) this should be fun.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Ah, precious Google points, the currency of the future.
Until then, it's like Amazon Mechanical Turk, except you work for free.
On a completely unrelated note, this would be a handy service for spammers to get their CAPTCHAs solved for free.
Who thought working for google could be so much fun :-)???
"Charlie", if you are out there, thanks for the amazing 15 rounds we had in a row...
Also, can I get some props for making the highscore with "SMMM"???
Just type "picture" for every image shown. It's foolproof if you have a savvy partner.
Here is a google video of Luis doing a google tech talk about human computation which I am wishing was linked from the google Image labeler home page itself.
liqbase
This sounds like the ESP Game project of Carnegie Mellon University.
I put my bitch ex-girlfriend's cell phone number as an answer. Was that wrong of me?
Ok, I didn't really, but I thought about it. Anyone else sending messages to complete stangers via this "game"?
I think it's pretty ridiculous, but I do find myself competing for ranking in the system. It's human nature to be competitive, and I know from experience that I'm competitive in even some rather ridiculous circumstances.
It's actually a lot more fun (and social) than many computer games I've played, because it's not just about finding applicable labels, but labels that you think the other person will guess. Also looking at what kinds of things matched before gives you some feeling of who you're partnered with, and what words they will likely use.
To me this looks like a winner, for Google at least. And you know what? If this is entertainment, and it helps people find the information they need, I don't mind doing "work" for Google, not one bit. So far they've been very good to me, and as long as that keeps up, I can't feel bad for supporting them.
Remember when amazon.com paid $.03 to identify pictures through their mechanical turk program? Now Google wants us to do it for free.
Recently, I watched a lecture on Google Video about Human Computation, and it discussed this.
Luis von Ahn apparently developed the idea. Check it out here.,
Very interesting stuff. He also discusses a different game to identify certain parts of an object that are associated with the labels.
I wondered if Google would (or was) taking advantage of the information gleaned from the ESP game. Apparently they have.
-- If unsure, say "Why?"
What happens to the valuable points earned by tinfoil hat wearing geeks like me that don'a allow google cookies?
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Isn't this essentially mturk without the money?
http://www.mturk.com/
"new beta service called Google Image Labeler"
This service is not for my benefit or anyone else but Google. Everyone can see it is a thinly disguised way for Google to get "the Internet" to do image tagging for free.
That doesn't mean that people won't find the service fun, it does seem to parallel a few board games I am familiar with.
How was Google Image Labeler developed?
Google Image Labeler is based in part on technology licensed from and developed at Carnegie Mellon University.
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/help.html
Google is now harnessing a distributed operating system, you and me. They use games to get us to essentially program for them and reduce error by having multiple people do the same task and use what answers come out.
Very clever. Of course this was done by Amazon as well I think and I dont know what has come of that effort.
But it really means that they are using the processing power of people to avoid having to create artificial intelligence. And why not? Just use real intelligence from people and let them enjoy it by thinking it is a game!
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
My strategy? To enter "photo" for every photo... and hope someone else has the same strategy.
I forsee Google finally having success beyond a search engine in the year 2010. The one-off 'innovations' such as a picture labeling game are just that, one-off and with no longevity.
This is quite definitely beta stuff. Maybe alpha. In particular, the "pass" system seems borked. I came across an image that was unidentifiable, and clicked "Pass." It said, "Waiting on your partner to pass." Long, dreary seconds ticked by, and then it said "Your partner wants to pass." ... ???
Why yes! I'd be glad to agree with my partner's request, except that I ALREADY SENT a pass request, and now the button is greyed out.
This happened several times. The first time, we were almost done anyway, so I let the timer expire. Guess what? If time expires while in this confused "we both want to pass but the system isn't working" state, then it doesn't actually complete the sequence (ie redirect you to the "completion" page). It just sits there, leaving you no choice but to manually return to the beginning page.
Also, people are dumb. I got a picture of a mountain road bordered by pine trees with a large cloud on the horizon. So over the course of about twenty seconds I suggested:
- Cloud
- Mountain
- Road
- Trees
- Pine Trees
- Thunderhead
- Cars
- Car
My partner still hadn't suggested any terms. So I suggested:
- nincompoop
- light weight
- My partner is an idiot
None of those matched, thankfully.
Google licensed the game. Luis von Ahn even gave a lecture at Google some time ago (which you can watch here)
That's right, the points don't matter, just like a comb to Colin Mochrie.
I tried it out. Aside from most of the pictures being to small to see what the hell they are (this is a major problem), when I tried it and couldn't tell what the first image was, I clicked "pass". It then said "your partner is waiting for you to pass". I couldn't click pass again since it was grayed out. So I needed to sit there for 1:30 waiting for the time to run out. I tried a few more times and though of coarse that doesn't happen every time, there are many other annoyances like that that you just don't expect from Google.
... and don't know how to properly label an image, just enter goatse, hihi. Chances are not zero that you're matched to a fellow Slashdotter with the same twisted sense of humor...
it's too frustrating - for both players !
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
And it's kinda flawed at the moment. Seems to hang a lot for one thing, but the main problem is that the images are so ridiculously tiny. Google aren't going to get useful tags that way - most of the points of agreement end up being words like "man" or "people" or "building". It's frustrating, because often it's clearly a specific building, maybe even with a sign saying EXACTLY what it is, except that the text is half a pixel high.
That said, the end-of-game summary is an illuminating (and terrifying) revelation of just how bad some people's spelling is.
Seriously, this raises a good point. Sites like this, that let "users" add their "creativity" to add to a sum off... nothing really. I mean, all this creativity that the users of these sites repress and use for these useles purposes must be possible to channel into something more usefull! I wonder when some hot, young company manages to make a business of actually using all the creativity available on the internet to do something usefull?
.net millionare by creating the "bahoo" of the next generation of surfers!? I mean, when they all grow tired of myspace, they must turn somewhere!
Hey, maybe I could be the next
or?
Opera 7.54 (what I have installed on this puter) scales images nicely.
Ctrl + mouse wheel up/down = zoom in or zoom out.
I imagine the most recent 9.x still has that feature.
I can't vouch for this site: http://www.obermair.net/opera/operausben.htm but it was near the top of Google's results for a no-install version of Opera 9.01
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Don't you mean BORED games?
I've run across a few partners so far that do nothing but "pass" on every picture.
A picture of the night sky, filled with stars. They want to pass. They can't even type in "stars" or "sky"? Oi... It wouldn't be a real internet experience without the trolls...
Love sees no species.
1) Google Points
2) Ebay
3) ???
4) PROFIT!
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
It desperately needs larger pictures - at that scale it's very hard to see what they are.
www.sjbaker.org
Points get you karma. Karma gets you posting bonus. Posting bonus gets you visibility. Visibility gets you moderation, access to readers, and, ultimately, GNAA membership.
I played about 10 times. 9 out of the 10 times, I got really lame people who mostly wanted to pass. 1 time, I got someone who was actually mentally engaged in the game and we got 900 points. It would be fun to do better, but if finding a non-retarded partner is typically such a pain, I'm not sure if it's worth it.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
And I'm posting as an Anonymous Coward to protect my karma.
Lokos like they need to add some horsepower to that server, I'm getting timeouts.
This is just Google struggling to become self-aware. No need for concern...
--
I am, therefore I should think
Is it me or is the server getting a bit slashdotted?
Typical though, the slashdot crowd turn up and only half can get a partner.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Beware, it may be addictive. ;)
My prediction: at some future time, somebody, somewhere is going to sue Google for conning people into performing valuable work for free. The suit will demand back wages, social security payments, health and retirement benefits. Not to mention m/billions for the class action attorneys.
If you talk about brilliance, this has been done before http://www.espgame.org/
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
you do realize most of the people playing right now are probably coming from here... Is this the new meaning of Slashdotted? A herd of idiots unable to identify any non pornographic picture?
its called human computation similar to captach's etc,
the esp game or idea behind getting people to annotate
images with words was i think developed by luis von ahn
Arash Partow
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Danny Sullivan reported that Luis von Ahn granted use of his ESP Game through licensing. http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060901-0943 09
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
It's not useful to anyone when your partner doesn't respond to anything and you're stuck looking at the same image for 90 seconds. I've had two responsive partners out of six tries. No wonder today's top score is only 2000. After getting 900 in one run, I thought it would be no problem to beat.
Perhaps Google should restrict this to logged-in users only. They might get less matches, but they'd probably get more productive info.
If you watch the video of the creator, he talks a lot about the science behind it. He also points out Peekaboom, which takes ESP a step further. Now two players are actually identifying what part of the image is a man, or a car, etc. It's pretty fascinating, especially as it might apply to test data for image recognition research.
J
In theory, this is a great idea!
In practice, most images are labeled as "man", "table", or other non-specific things. You could achieve the same results from some well-crafted A.I. algorithms.
And really, isn't this the idea of "tagging"? I can tag a Slashdot story; the more popular the tag, the more likely it'll be used.
This will provide google with many labellings.. but I worry about the quality.. Under time pressure, people playing this game will want to give replies they know are so simple anyone else would guess.. I saw a photo of the moon during play, and someone labelled it 'ground'-- true, but not that helpful.
lets try and screw with this as a group. type in 123 for every image you see, hopefully you will get matched with another slashdotter and will be able to move along quickly.
I need CAKE NIGGA!"
Kind of weak from the kings of the algorithms and software patents.
Forgive me if I appear to not care about my karma, but it's late an I've had a few drinks, but could someone point out to me why this is important to, well, anyone?
just without the CAPTCHA and with less porn.
If they aren't motivated by points, but have nothing better to do than sit there and abuse a service which they aren't required to use, then I sincerely doubt they are the ones that are in a position to "enlighten" anyone.
I got a picture of a particle accelerator. I am sure that is what is was, because I've seen them before. My partner passed. Sure enough, I got a link for some physics page with a particle accelerator. Doh!
Here's a thought: If Google expects me to do something for them, how about a FREE broadband connection as compensation?
I must have been paired with Juan or Gunter because I couldn't get any matches for my picture of a red ballon. I should have typed in "rojo".
Interesting maybe, but how useful is the information they're getting. Since it's formatted as a game, most people are prone to picking the simplest labels to make sure their partner picks the same thing. That kind of labelling isn't going to help someone searching the Internet for specific pictures or pictures with a specific context. For example, an image of an obscure literary figure is certain to be labelled 'man' or 'woman' by a player, but someone using a search engine will undoubtedly type in the figure's name. As well, someone looking for pictures from a recent convention won't be helped by labels like: men, gathering, meeting, or group of people.
Come on, Doofus, get off your lazy ass and start making some sensible suggestions... But nothing, he just sits there...
And then, when there's nothing more to say, then PASS, dammit!
I don't know how people can stand this. I started yelling at the computer after my second loser partner. It's like going on a speed date from hell.
it's cool and all, but how do I turn off safe filtering? =)
Amazon has a similar game, except they pay you:
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
They should give the AVERAGE score of the person playing aswell. Anyone can keep playing a long time, but it takes someone with a good knowledge to score well on average.
I think they should have two scores because of this.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
As of right now that URL is officially gone. We totally slashdotted google.
I kept getting paired with the same dolt that would suggest one word, or none at all, just sitting there waiting for the clock to tick by.
BEST. GAME. EVER.
games journalism blog
Well, you need to play for a bit longer to get to this point, but they actually start adding entries to the "off-limit" area, there-by forcing you and your partner to generate more specified results. This refinement process is a good idea, IMO, and will generate the best set of data with which to gauge the effectiveness of their recently aquired image analyzing software, Neven Vision.
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
Mod parent up. Really nice video, and great ideas from this Luis Von Arn's. I enjoyed it A LOT!
My wife managed to actually get 20 matches with someone!! It is very difficult to be paired with someone who is serious about playing, or then they are just too slow of typers.
Meh.
The small size could be for your own protection.
Lables by Person 1:
Man
Streaching
Gouging out eyes
You:
Gouging out eyes.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Watch the high scores pile up! If all slashdotters just put 'picture' for the answer, google might consider adding picture to a the list of 'off limits'.
Not only are the pics too small... (come on Google, with all those PHD's this should be a quick fix), ... but also the game needs some additional serious improvements such as:
1) There needs to be a "NEXT" button. For some images 1 minute and 30 seconds is too much time. I get the feeling a lot of people confuse "pass" with 'moving on to the next picture', so I think a lot of effort is wasted here as I imagine that "pass" means discard the data from both users and move on to next pic.
2) There should be a real time score matching as each person enters labels, this would really motivate players
3) Matching with random players doesn't work in most games because people want to play with others who are either at the same level of skill (in this case also speed - its boring as hell waiting 1 minute for your 8 year old (or 80 year old) partner to type in 1 label). Or allow people to do international competitions. I.E. Canada vs. USA or whatever.
4) I hope labels get spell checked before they are compared, otherwise there's a lot of misses
5) The label typing box should be smaller. For the first 3 or 4 times I tried it, I intuitively typed many labels separated by commas, only later to realize that all those sequencial words only counted as 1 label.
6) I have two internet connections with two different providers, on both PCs, the next image to come up took several seconds to show up... what's up with that Oh Google of infinite bandwidth?
This thing needs some serious improvements before it becomes addicting... right now its closer to 'lame' & if your partner is too slow... 'annoying'.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
The pass is not broken, at least the times I've tried it. I usually get some lame partner who quits after the second image, but maybe that's just a result of getting masses of people directed your way who are just curious and don't really want to play
It's kind of like, charades or something. Only on the computer. Hopefully this really will result in better results for image searches.
Suggestions for google to make it better:
They need to make the images bigger! About 1/3 the time I couldn't tell what it was, and had to zoom in (thank god for XGL: win key + right click zooms in quite nicely) to tell, and even then it was a picture of some strange evil-looking machine or jumble of vegetation that I couldn't really tell what it was.
It would be nice after you've matched the image to see what your partners tags were, so you can kind of see what kind of person they are. If he's spamming tags and/or being a moron I'd like to know, also it would let me get into their frame of mind: once I had a picture of a mountain, and we both had to go through about 7 tags before we got "snow"
Also know as pigeon rank ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Uh, I don't know... PASS. Huh? Nothing happened. OK, label it "text". Huh? Nothing much is happening. Grrr...
WTF am I supposed to do? How do I go to the next image? What happens to my view if the other person does PASS, sits on his ass, labels something (match or not), or closes his web browser?
Does this even work with firefox at all?
Do we get porn?
And please mod down the GP, how the hell did that troll get modded insightful?
I got into the top 500 in about 20 minutes. I used 'bad' labels -- things like 'man' and 'person'. But hey, I got a high score!
This is cool, but they should make you have a high-speed connection, and pass an IQ test to do this. My partners either had slow modems, or were just plain morons.
What they apparently plan to do is to use the data to train some supervised adaptive system, like a neural network to perform image classification. This type of data collection is usually very tedious (or expensive if you hire somebody else to do it). And google, the clever "parent" has managed to get its "children" to willingly work.
I'd demand payment in google stocks.
There are a lot of people out there using google, but I doubt each one of them is willing to help label images regularly enough. But Google's image index is huge, much larger than its web page index (at least it ought to be, since each page tends to have several images on it on average, even if we allow for duplicate background images etc). So they'll get a few million images labeled, and then what? That's less than 1/1000th of what they ought to have collected by now. So it's not scalable.
The second problem is reliability. People vary tremendously in the way they interpret information. As an example, consider John Graham-Cumming's SpamOrHam website. It shows people email messages and asks if they're spam. That should be a simpler problem, since there's two possibilities, right? But it turns out that people disagree *a lot*: the disagreements are often on the order of 10-20%. With image labelling, expect at least that kind of fuzziness as well.
Harnessing people to do the labeling seems like a bad idea to me. People are fickle, and very unreliable.
I wonder how many of those images are labeled:
PASS GOD DAMNIT!
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
There's a video from the creator of the ESP Games on Google Video. I'm sure it's posted above somewhere. Watch it, because the guy is clearly really smart and has addressed most of the objections.
I particularly liked how it deals with an odd number of players. Instead of making the one extra person wait, it just uses a previous player's recorded moves and plays the same game with them.
I just played for a couple of minutes and found myself mostly in your situation, with only 1 worthy partner with whom I managed to earn 500 points. But after some thinking, I feel the concept is flawed because this competition leads to subpar results. In order to score, everybody tries to dumb down what he sees in the hope his "friend" will do the same. For instance, we were presented the face of a normal guy, with a little beard and fairly bald, but what matched was only his *glasses*. As the picture wasn't about glasses at all, except for the guy to have worn some, this label would actually push the picture to top rank on a glasses search, but the result would be worthless for the user.
I am a good contributor -- meaning I type fast, put in lots of words, don't put in 'person' or 'image' as the first word for every picture but try to add more meaningful words -- but the system doesn't give me any reason to continue.
My only reason to do more would be for the fun of helping contribute data to make search better. For this reason I'd actually spend some time. But I end up stuck on one or two pictures for 90 seconds with some lousy partners who only put in 1 keyword in 30 seconds. Who needs that? Boring. There are better ways to spend time.
Google should fix it so good partners have a higher likelihood of being paired with each other.
Everyone should just label everything sex or boobs. It would really mess with people trying to search for sex/boobs...
Of course! Because people who think Google's game is a complete waste of time would definitely want to spend several hours of their precious time playing that game as badly as possible, in order to send a "message" about time-wasting to some anonymous person who they know nothing about and will never meet or even talk to. It all makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up.
Actually, I've got an alternate explanation: The server was malfunctioning under the load of too many people trying to play it at once.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
only google could present something this mundane and get slashdot coverage. any other company would be laughed off their server.
I'm just here for the sigs
ok, I've been playing this for a few minutes and heres some of what i've thought:
:), :(, oops, ect ect. It would be awesome if they would include something like this, so you could put stuff like
:)
1) It possible to communicate with your parter, just type what you want to say to them, as a lable, then, if they check their past images to see what their partner labled stuff as, they'll see your response.
2) Google needs to inform players, if their partner navigates away from the page. I've had several times when the other person has completely disapeared, and nothing happens. You eventually just give up and go back to the start. Google should pop up a message saying "Your partner has closed, or navigated away from this page. Do you wish to start anew?"
3) A limited communication system would be really nice. Anyone played Windows Checkers online? You can't chat to each other, but you can send responces like "good move",
"I can't see anything"
"picture too small"
"look closer"
"are you still there?"
"do you want to pass?"
"yes"
"no"
":)"
":("
"hard"
"easy"
ect. You get the idea.
4) The pass system really is broken, heres what i've been doing: I tried Firefox and Opera, Firefox had bugs and Opera didn't work for me at all. So far i've had the best luck using the site, with IE (eww). If you your partner wants to pass, wait about 5 or 10 seconds before clicking pass. If you click too soon, it seems to get crossed wires and then you get the hanging effect.
5) If you can get Firefox to work, get the image zoom plugin.
6) Checking what lables your partner used, gives you a better idea about what they look at, and what they focus on. This makes it slightly easier to get matches.
7) Try and list objects in the picture, text, people (be they man, women, group, couple, ect), machines (car, vehicle), buildings (type, color, part of building), environment (water, trees, outside, inside, night, daytime) ect.
it should be a lot more fun once they get all the bugs ironed out
Do not anger the Karma Whores, for they don't bathe often, and might decide to come visit you in person. -Ryan Amos
Tiny pictures you can't see what is. And then you have to wait for some other guy, so i go to another tab - meaning now he is waiting on me.
Lame implementation, and two people aren't enough surely?
It should be just for you, so you set the pace and run through a lot of pics. Then they store the keywords you have suggested and show the pics to other people, when they have 10 sets they can compare and use the ones in common.
After trying this for a while not once did we have something in commong - sorry Google, yet another step towards the dark side.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Maybe it's because we all use firefox.
The government can't save you.
Lowest common denominator, that's the quality of results they'll end up with. I might see a picture and label it "bird", where my partner, being an ornithologist, labels its exact scientific and common names. Until he enters "bird" we don't get a match.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Yay, I just matched 17!
Meh.
Holy crap, that is clever. Where do they think this stuff up? What a great way to get people to work for them for free.
I wish Google would hire me.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Most of the time, I get paired with someone who does nothing. Times ticks by, clock runs out - and when the timer shows 0:00 nothing happens. It still says "Your partner hasn't suggested any labels yet." while showing the image.
So they need to make this more like a game.
You need to be given bonus time to keep playing if you do a good job. Basically make the interaction change if you do a good job, and you will hook a lot more people.
They need to give more feedback on what the other person labeled images you have already done. This will make teh team work together better.
Why isn't flickr doing this?
As a non-native English speaker, this game has allowed me to learn new words, and how people from other cultures see a same image. I see hands where others see labor, that kind of think.
If you haven't tried it, try it: you'll learn things about how people perceive pictures. And if your random partner has the same thinking schemes than you, you'll get points!
Google points worth nothing, but that's Google points. Yeah.
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
I get a clock counting down and a broken image icon.
I enter "broken", then hit "label". Nothing happens.
I enter "404", then hit "label". Nothing happens.
I enter "error", then hit "label". Nothing happens.
I enter "failure", then hit "label". Nothing happens.
I hit "pass", which turns that button grey.
Nothing much else happens.
Eventually the clock stops at 0.
Still nothing interesting happens.
This all looks like some kind of elaborate joke,
getting people to screw with a web page that doesn't
really do anything.
Now just point the image fetcher at various captcha-brokered sites, and voila!
[
In my 35600 point accumulation the most common matched words were these..
man
women
house
building
trees
black, white, blue,red, green, pink(colors)
factory
mountain
group
people
website / webpage
black and white
so what's happened it that no-one can figure out how to use software to identify images, so the huge corporations have decided to use the power of the human brain to do their work for them for free. positive reinforcement added by giving you "points". dance, monkeys, dance.
I wonder if a similar game for labeling video would work well. As the video plays, players would type words corresponding to whatever they see at that moment. Word matches between players would only occur within a small time interval (e.g., within 5 seconds say). Players can type the same word multiple times and matches with the same word may occur multiple times. Of course, as with the ESP Game, you would need various mechanisms to detect cheating.
So what's happened is that no-one can figure out how to use software to identify images, so the huge corporations have decided to use the power of the human brain to do their work for them for free. Operant conditioning and positive reinforcement gets you to do what they want you to by giving you "points". Nice trick.
I presume Google has no intention of paying anyone for the time they put into this system.
As such all that this really represents is a way for a large, profit driven corporation to make money by using the time and efforts of a large collection of individuals.
Seems kinda sinister to me. Personally I would like to gather the rewards for my own efforts, not allow some megacorp to do so. But unarguably a very 'creative' way to go about it, to be sure.
Read Pynchon.
While I'm down with having humans drive databases that computers could never drive, doesn't anybody think that this labeling technique is lame-ifying google images? When I played, the first image I got was of a computer and a scientific instrument. I have no idea what this scientific instrument is, so I type 'computer'. That just feels backwards.
Then I got the backside of a dvd whose title I couldn't make out. My question become "why should I be labeling these things when I don't have any insight."
The question of insight or prior knowledge is important with regards to context. Lets say I'm posting a preview image for a Wordpress Skin. The classic google image tags associated with this are "Wordpress Theme," which contextually fits if you're a user searching for wordpress themes.
However, if you look at an image of a Wordpress Theme, you won't label it either Wordpress or theme, you'll label it "blog", but if you're searching for images of "blogs," wouldn't you want to filter out "lorum ipsum" entries?
If I'm looking for images with the term "scientific instrument," I _expect_ to find something vague and cliparty, whereas if I look for images labeled "electron microscope," I expect very specific results.
My point being that this tool is muddying the distinctions between highly specific imagery and a vague third-party notion of what the image may be about.
What do you all think?
Images are too small
Pair off quick typists together
Match on single words too
There will be matches on single words that don't really describe images well
There will be matches on common typos
You start to enter generic words that you think other will put in (prisoner's dilemma?)
You start with the obvious first so you don't describe images well, even if you know better descriptions (maybe too long, maybe you can't spell it, you don't think others will get it)
It's addictive!!!
Gah!
Google is building an army of telepaths!
Paul Graham at YCombinator said a month ago (when Google Calendar took over Kiko's market) that "[Google] would never even think of something like likebetter."
Okay, so this is barely similar to likebetter, I just thought I'd mention it.
Once I realized that at the end you could see each others guesses, I just went there and started entering random tags for the images, to confound and irritate my opponent.
I would like to think that the people were wondering why I entered things like "Walrus" or "Toaster" when a picture of a baby showed up, but in retrospect, they probably didn't bother looking at the images to see what I'd entered.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Hear, hear. That's the first thing I thought of, too.
It's not so sinister when they tell you up front.
"I forgot my mantra."
Yeah, sinister, just like making web designers put WORDS on their web pages, all in an effort to catalog them!
After playing for a short while, you realise that there is a common set of words that everyone knows are the best first tries.
Lady, Girl, Man seem to be really common (even if not right) and colours too.
So it soon ends up that pictures are labelled by the words that help you win, rather than the most appropriate words for the image.
Happy moony
What if we all collectively agree to mark every single image "gay".
Then we all get scores, and Google gets to show up pretty gay image results.
Would it be too far out there to propose that your "payment" is finding the right images when you search google for a specific word? That you have to spend less time clicking the "next" page, or trying to further refine your search?
I don't mind spending a few minutes a day doing this if I know that it's going to help me search in the future.
You will report to a Google facility and be asigned an area to be cleaned. You will be provided all the necessary mops, toilet brushes, etc., as well as a WiFi headset. You will be matched by computer with another player in another Google facility with the same square footage and number of toilets. Then you will begin cleaning your area, and report via your headset when you are done. The computer will compare your cleaning time with your partner's. The player with the quickest cleaning time wins the match and gets 10 Google points. After each match you will have time to review with your partner your strategies for keeping your cleaning time as low as possible.
This friendly competition promises to not only be a fun way to meet other Google enthusiasts, but also a way to advance human knowledge of janatorial science!
See you at the janitor's closet!
I don't care how much fun it is, if it's helping a for-profit company gain more profits, I expect to be compensated. I can't believe how many of you people buy into this idea that Google made a fun pseudo-game that boosts their search engine effectiveness. Let's all play and boost their profits! Yay!
If they offered you points for cleaning out the gutters at the Google Campus, would you spend your weekends doing it?
I love Google and it's the main search engine I use, and I hope they do well (though I'm all for competitiveness too). But I don't work for free, sorry.
Here's a better idea: Pay people minimum wage to do this. I'll bet there's armies of people happy to make that kind of money sitting in front of their computer instead of shoveling poop or whatever else crap jobs are available at minimum wage.
# Erik
Take care that this does not happen to you.
Nothing new to see here. Mice have long used humans to solve problems for them.
broke the daily top 10....just think REAL basic here people. when you can't make out the tiny picture, go with the major color!
how is this useful?
...
Careful, now; that attitude makes you sound like a communist. It is the basic idea behind the Communist Manifesto: workers should reap the benefits of their own efforts, this requires that everyone owns the means of production he uses, and since a factory can't be operated by a single person alone, it should be owned communally by all the workers working there who can then share the profits between themselves instead of having a rich capitalist - megacorp in these times - pocket them.
Your desire to gain the benefit from your own work is, therefore, completely un-American. The capitalist way of doing things is that you do the work, the investors get the profits, and you get to compete with the Indians for who can survive with the lowest wage. Since India has a much lower cost of living, you're going to lose. Since your economy is bleeding money to India, the buying power of the people of your country is going to shrink, making it more neccessary for corporations to try to cut costs by hiring more Indians, and the situation is going to get worse and worse.
Sure makes you glad to live in a capitalist country, doesn't it ? And sure makes this post likely to be modded down by free-market fundamentalists who don't quite understand that communism ("people should own the means of production they use, and if a particular means needs more than one people to operate, then those people should own it communally") is not exclusive to free market ("everyone is free to produce what they want and trade with whoever they will").
Mod me down, but I'm still right.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
On Konqueror 3..4
Am I missing something?
I've been trying it for the last 20 minutes or so. It's entertaining for a while, but I've noticed that most of the labels I seem to get in common with my partner tend to be those of the lowest common denominator. About half the times that my partner and I reached an agreement, it was with labels such as "sky" when the sky was at least partly visible, "crowd" when there were more than two people, and maybe "black" if the image was too dark to see anything in detail. There were many cases that I could come up with a much more useful label (eg. "aurora", "intel processor", etc.), but those cases tended to involve more specialised knowledge that the other (random) person probably didn't have, and it was unlikely they'd ever come up with the same label.
I can't find much information on what Google plans to do with this data, or how they're going to apply it, besides "improving the image search". I'd be interested to know how this will work, because I'm not sure what could be gained by knowing that two people agreed on some very basic words. To me it seems as if it'd simply help to create about 50 to 100 major categories of images, which might be some kind of superficial help for a minority of searches where someone wants a broad range of images that very loosely match a label, but otherwise with not much useful detail at all.
Sort of like a dictionary that lists words by how you THINK they're spelled, without the correct spelling. Makes it a lot easier to look up the wrong things, doesn't help you much though.
As google accumilates more and more data about its users it can draw ever more complex conclusions. At the moment it is not used for the wrong purpesses. But this 'game' seems very much like a technique used by psychiatrists to assess a persons mental state. This, combined with the search data, the e-mails, the calender data and for some people the excel and word files created with googles products seems more than I'd care to put into one database. I agree that it's a great product. And it's one of the inovations on search tech I've been waiting for. In my opinion it's introduced in a time where abuse of this kind of information happens ever more frequent. Bottom line, do we trust google enough to give them insite in our thoughts?
"don't quite understand that communism ("people should own the means of production they use, and if a particular means needs more than one people to operate, then those people should own it communally") is not exclusive to free market ("everyone is free to produce what they want and trade with whoever they will")."
Not according to Marx in his "Communist Manifesto", who said: "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
Communal worker ownership of the means of production is only *part* of communism, and possibly the most benign part. Unfortunately the abolition of private property means that the *fruits* of production are also communally owned -- and thus in a sense not owned by anyone at all except those handful of individuals that claim to represent the whole of the community.
Aswell as the pics being far too small to make out a lot of them, a lot of partners I had were really bad at labelling the results. They were being too vague in order to match which wouldn't help the search data. Example: last pic I had was a boy in a halloween costume. This definately should have been labelled Halloween or costume or something descriptive along those lines. But our match was "boy."
This, I think, is how it works...
You both get to type in labels. When you do, the other player gets notified as to how many keywords has been submitted. If any pair of labels match, then your matched pair goes onto the 'Off limits' list for that pic, and you move on to the next pair. So each pair contributes at most 1 phrase or word to the labels list for each pic. Unmatched keywords are ignored.
Clicking pass sends the message that you want to pass to your partner. If he clicks pass as well, you skip the pic. However, it only raises the flag - you can still keep guessing even if you've raise the intention that you want to pass. It just means - I'm ok to pass if you want to.
If the other player sits on his ass, then you are screwed for the next 90 seconds. If he closes his browser, presumeably your session quits out too. Score is counted both per session, and as a sum total over all a player's sessions. It works in firefox. So far, I have not seen any porn.
(picture of puppies sleeping)
obviousGuy33: pets
OMGPONIES11: adorable!@!!
bitterGoth: FUN TO KICK
CreepyMcCreep99: dinner
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
How many points must you score to get to the porn ???
They're either upgrading their pigeons to Slashus-dottus-sapiens or they're outsourcing and putting these pigeons out of work. http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
I'm finding that slow/stupid users are the biggest problem. The best approach is to get into an all-out free-association mode and type whatever comes to mind. But of course, you have to be able to type well, and you have to be reasonably intelligent. Far, far too many images are going to be labeled "man," "woman," and "map"...
I do suspect that they're using this to train image recognition software...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Or is *everybody* stupid?
If you're going to argue in favor of an economic structure which is different from the common understanding of the word "communism", you would be better off avoiding the term entirely. Seeing as communism is completely discredited in most people's minds, you'd have better luck convincing people of your ideas if you present them as an adjustment to capitalism.
I'm not arguing in favor of any economic structure; I'm simply pointing out that the OP sounds communistic to me, and warning him that it can be used against him. Me, I think that any economic or social structure will get perverted to serve the ones in power and oppress everyone else, so it doesn't really matter what it nominally is. And anarchy leads to law of the jungle and dictatorship of the strongest so it doesn't help either.
Best you can do is refuse to abuse others yourself, and try to defend against such abuses against yourself or your loved ones; but human nature can't be changed just by changing the nominal economic or social system, and it's that where the abuse comes from, which means that it will be with us for a long time to come - barring armageddon or other similar event.
They aren't my ideas, and they can't be presented as an adjustment to capitalism, since they are fundamentally contradictory to the idea of capitalism. In capitalism, the economic system revolves capital - thus the word capitalism - which is what you invest to get profits. A capitalist tries to maximize his return of investment, so he pays as little for the work as possible, without considering the fairness of that wage. Maximization of return of investment is fundamentally incompatible with paying more than absolutely has to be paid.
In other words, in a capitalist system the profits go to the capitalist - a megacorp, in all likelihood. A system where you geting a fair compensation for your work is a factor is not capitalist.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Re' the cases in which you have "Inside Information" that your partner is not likely to have: I had the same experience when I was presented with a photo documenting the opening of the (newly renovated) art museum at Princeton. We agreed on "building" after I exahusted all specific terms like "art, princeton" etc'. What I think google should do is keep the terms that were not matched in the exchange, and see whether they match other terms given by other people to the photo. After all, that's where the great power is. THe "agreement" is just a "carrot" to keep you going, but I would guess that that is *not* where the bulk of info is extracted from.
I'm not upset that you're criticizing capitalism, but that you're doing it out of ignorance:
..." line?), whether or not their efforts produced any benefit. Whether or not a given worker is completely useless.
It is the basic idea behind the Communist Manifesto: workers should reap the benefits of their own efforts,
No, communists believe that people should be paid "according to need" (remember that "from each according to ability
this requires that everyone owns the means of production he uses, and since a factory can't be operated by a single person alone, it should be owned communally by all the workers working there who can then share the profits between themselves instead of having a rich capitalist - megacorp in these times - pocket them.
Again, the whole "corporations get all the profits". Well, they also get all the losses. Do you want to wait to get paid until the corporation has paid back all of its expenses? Do you want to refund wages when it sinks without earning a profit? If you think your employer is going to get rich, a neat trick is to "buy shares". In a worker-owned factory, every worker's ENTIRE investments are in the factory. If ANYTHING goes wrong -- over which they have no control -- they lose their job and their savings. Nice deal, huh? This is why people don't own their workplaces. It makes much more sense for them to trade their share in their workplace and buy shares in a broad array of businesses so as to insure themselves against the financial risk.
Contrary to what you have said above, it is possible to have worker-owned factories under capitalism. They're actually heavily tax favored. Of all the enormous unions out there, any one of them could have pooled members funds and performed a hostile takeover (look it up) of any existing corporation. The reason they don't is, a) the financial risk above, and b) they all realize that what would happen is that for a few days they would merrily "pay themselves" a "fair wage" until they realized they could just pay the market rate for other people to do it.
Please, cure your ignorance.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Right. Because capitalists' wages and salaries are by no means "the benefits of their own efforts."
...but is it art?
So, much black-hat negative karma points to the antisocial *** who writes the first trojan that does this distributedly. (Do black hats like negative karma?)
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
OK, play this game this way:
Lets try to just enter "1" as the label to all images.
You may identify yourself with a name like (Just write 1)
When any of us are matched up together, we should easily get a new high score.
Other people will see that the high score is helt by "just write 1" and "always write 1", and soon catch on.
Not sure what you will use the points for, but at least you beat the game....
You can probably see from the screen names of the people that are current high score holders that this is just wha they did. Not sure if Google gets good data here.
"Fix it"
...whether it's really hot grits, or if she's just happy to see you?
Now they have usernames for people that don't have Google accounts to go with the omnipresent cookie.
What happened to "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"? That's hardly reaping the benefits of your own efforts.
Stop! Dremel time!
I think it might be useless. What is there in the pictures to tell other than: child, woman, man... etc, and such generic terms. I mean, for real, we really don't know anything about those pictures.
In the short term this is quite a smart business trick. Convince people it's "fun" to do what they would otherwise have to pay people to do and pay them with "points" instead of something tangible. However I think once the novelty wears off and people realize that in the long run this scheme is a one-way transfer of value they won't find it as "fun".
However in the long term this may yield a viable basis for micropayments, especially if people could trade in their points for cash or ad-free browsing.
I guess it's been long enough now for people to start rehashing the same rhetoric, thinking they're brilliant.
Sounds like an Ayn Rand reader.