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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.)
Entertainment is a purpose.
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?
"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
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 :)
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.
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.
You missed the point. You can't just magically automate something like object recognition. You can, however, train filters on computers based on how humans identify objects in images.
eclecti.cc
You can't take the sky from me...
What did you expect. Games are entertainment. Some people's idea of entertainment is f*cking with the system.
Only the naive YoMama! would expect YoMama to result in YoMama clean set of YoMama. The YoMama way YoMama you YoMama get YoMama results YoMama if YoMama paid YoMama to YoMama AND YoSista tied to performance.
Kevin Smith on Prince
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.
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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Open Source Sysadmin
...are they fun?