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.)

Comments

Everyone? benefits

[dvice_null]

"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?

Re:Computers aren't getting smarter...

[xenocide2]

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.