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Games With A Purpose Help With Tasks That Tax Computers

Posted by timothy on from the because-computers-are-dum dept.

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.)

6 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. All games have a purpose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Entertainment is a purpose.

  2. Porn for Captcha? by corsec67 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  3. Computers aren't getting smarter... by TheRedSeven · · Score: 1, Insightful
    ...they're just harvesting data from a lot of people.

    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.

    1. Re:Computers aren't getting smarter... by Entrinzikyl · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This distributed work *is* being done so computers can apply your dog tags automatically to other images of dogs. This is just a 'fun' way of getting the massive amount of data needed to do things like that. I'll be impressed when computers are able to tag images without using anything learned from correctly tagged data to do so.

    2. Re:Computers aren't getting smarter... by vux984 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'll be impressed when computers are able to tag images without using anything learned from correctly tagged data to do so.

      I'll be impressed when humans are able to tag images without using anything learned from correctly tagged data to do so.

  4. Yeah, but... by cjb658 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...are they fun?