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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.)
"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?
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.
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.
The author has an excellent Google Tech Talk where he describes exactly how these games help computers get smarter. Basically, language is a shared set of common knowledge that a single researcher cannot accurately recreate without interviewing everyone. The games are tools to do exactly that. They generate datasets for analysis, and for further game playing. For example, you might find yourself describing the word "preserve" and start with marking it the opposite of destroy, while the partner guesses "strawberry" and "raspberry".
He's got lots of neat results from that system in the talk. Go watch it.
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