Slashdot Mirror
Games With A Purpose Help With Tasks That Tax Computers
Falkkin writes "Luis von Ahn and his team at Carnegie Mellon University have launched GWAP, a new web site for 'Games With A Purpose.' By playing these online games, humans help provide data for problems that are hard for computers to solve, such as computer vision and sound classification. Slashdot has previously covered other human computation projects by Dr. von Ahn, including the ESP Game and reCAPTCHA. The new web site contains a re-vamping of the ESP Game as well as four completely new games." (Falkkin also points to an AP story on GWAP and to coverage at the BBC.)
Entertainment is a purpose.
will playing these games make my computer tax free?
I was going to give it a try, but it requires registration and I really just can't be bothered to register.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
"Everyone benefits! Now a search engine will have a better idea of what's in those images."
What search engine? Is the information I provide to them free for anyone to use, or is it just for them?
Why is this on /. exactly?
Hehe, their news page also has a video of the group using water balloons to wash a car.
"You play the games. Computers get smarter. Everyone benefits!"
Yeah, that's EXACTLY the kind of line I'd expect Skynet to use.
"Just a fox, a whisper."
Isn't this similar to using porn to solve CAPTCHAs? Or how about the Google image Labeler? And for a literary example, this is one part of the plot in Ender's Game, but not as obvious, and a more nefarious.
Using a large amount of real intelligence can make some problems easier, if a human can do it much easier, and some amount of noise is acceptable in the output.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
To play "Trace the picture of the doggy" or "The $10,000 Pyramid"
I'm not knockin the interface, it's great, but if I went to any 12 year old it would bore them to tears after 1 minute, with them whining "Can we play another game?"
Here's an idea. Give some OLPC's to kids in 3rd world countries. Teach them to read, then pay them $0.01 per problem they solve. Then sell your DB of solutions to Google for $0.03 a solution.
After playing with the site for a while, I especially like Squigl... basically you and a partner draw an outline around an object in an image. If you play, make sure you check the "auto-submit when done" button, it helps save precious time :)
As far as I can see, this is not making computers smarter. That is, it's not helping to teach them how to do the tasks given novel situations in the future. It's simply using aggregate human interaction to do tasks that are poorly suited for computers to do still--CAPTCHAs and image recognition.
This is just a way for the company to get hundreds (thousands?) of people to do menial tasks under the guise of having fun. Wouldn't it be better if we actually worked on automating these actions instead?
I'll be impressed when computers are able to take my tags on, say, a photo of my dog, and apply the same tag to other photos of dogs. Until then, this is just distributed work being done by a bunch of people.
Isn't this initiative similar to that launched by Chris McKintrey and Pushpinder Singh, both of whom created databases where questions used to aid in trying to give robots personality?
Didn't both of these projects fail for the same reason?
I'm sure that Slashdot actually covered this story, but for those interested, the link is here.
Geez, site has only been online a little while and already freakin' griefers have moved in. Last 3 games of ESP I played had dipshits that purposely gave answers that didn't even come close to describing the pictures. One idiot just kept guessing "YoMama". Fuckers.
You can't take the sky from me...
OK, so I gave FoldIt a go (it's at fold.it). It's based on the idea of using lots of people to do protein folding rather than automating it or giving the task to phDs. The main gameplay elements are two buttons, "shake" and "wiggle." You basically just move the strands around randomly, then push those two buttons until you hit an acceptable score. Maybe there's more depth to it, but that's about all I could surmise.
Still pretty fun though, and it runs in Wine.
My one piece of advice: make sure the password for the site account doesn't have any funny characters in it. It will say "yeah, sure, that's a fine password" when you register, but if you ever try to use it it will tell you it's wrong, and the password recovery process is utterly broken. You are given a single-use login token, which claims that it's directing you to a page where you can set up a new password, but all you'll ever be taken to is an "access denied" page. So standard web interface stuff, I suppose. *sigh*
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Were can I download the no partner patch?!?!
How can the summary possibly fail to mention the hottest current GWAP, foldit? I swear to god I couldn't sleep last night because I was thinking of freaking protein chains. Fortunately, I soon after started thinking of freaking women, at which point I was able to create some protein chains of my own.
OK, so the password works for the site, but if I try to post my problem (above), I get another "access denied" page.
The "beta" tag, in this case, really is there for a reason.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Luis von Ahn has an interesting obsession with games and their possible beneficial effects on humanity - both on an individual basis and in the greater sense. If you want some more information about his methodology or ideas, you can watch his lecture on human computation:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
As for von Ahn, I am currently studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon and I was lucky enough to have him as a professor (along with Godel prize winner Steven Rudich) for one of the most difficult classes at the school, Great Theoretical Ideas of Computer Science (15-251). He is very interesting and entertaining, and was able to teach much of the course material through games - though they are in no way the same types of games as the ones in the article.
At one point, I wanted to help him with the CAPTCHAs and their future direction (since they are becoming increasingly easy to crack and increasingly harder for humans to pass), but I was rebuffed. He is a cool guy with an aura of arrogance/confidence which does him well. I am glad to see he is making some progress.
...are they fun?
With my new game, you'll each do part of my day job, starting with the TPS reports & moving up to fixing a hard bug on Saturday. Games that help with tasks which tax humans are the future.
Now now, here's some food. Now stay in your cage.
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
The details which cause the problem are different, but the effect is the same. When you email support, do you get a form email back which suggests you try their broken password recovery procedure? There must be a template somewhere that people use to achieve this maximally annoying standard interface. The series of tubes folds back on itself to achieve this beowulf cluster-ah*m of a modern internets interface. Not just anyone could design this. There must be a distributed project capturing the wisdom of many web developers at the heart of this. Probably GPLed.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Games already have a purpose: to entertain the player. Why don't you just be honest and call your creations "Doing Research As Gaming" (DRAG)?
Actually, as this story demonstrates, this is becoming true everywhere.
Tag lost or not installed.