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Games With A Purpose Help With Tasks That Tax Computers

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 14, @04:22PM
from the because-computers-are-dum dept.
Education The Internet Games Science
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.)

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Firehose:Games With A Purpose website launched by Falkkin (97268)
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  • All games have a purpose (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 14, @04:30PM (#23409216)
    Entertainment is a purpose.

  • I was going to give it a try.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by cstdenis (1118589) on Wednesday May 14, @04:33PM (#23409254)
    I was going to give it a try, but it requires registration and I really just can't be bothered to register.

  • Everyone? benefits (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dvice_null (981029) on Wednesday May 14, @04:33PM (#23409258)
    "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?

  • Everyone benefits? (Score:5, Funny)

    by FrozenFOXX (1048276) on Wednesday May 14, @04:45PM (#23409442)
    "You play the games. Computers get smarter. Everyone benefits!"

    Yeah, that's EXACTLY the kind of line I'd expect Skynet to use.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Welcome to the Skynet SecurityCam matching game!

      To win, please select which of these pictures is Sarah Connor. Now!

  • Porn for Captcha? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by corsec67 (627446) on Wednesday May 14, @04:50PM (#23409512) Homepage Journal
    Isn't this similar to using [ox.ac.uk] porn to solve CAPTCHAs? Or how about the Google image Labeler [google.com]? 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.
    • It's not surprising this is similar to the Google Image Labeler since that's just a re-implementation of the ESP Game, which is also one of the games available on the GWAP site.
  • 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
    • But can you play GTA4 at work?

      Hell, if people were given the option of getting paid, even a minuscule amount, to play games at work...

  • I like Squigl (Score:4, Informative)

    by Falkkin (97268) on Wednesday May 14, @04:51PM (#23409532) Homepage
    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. [wired.com]

    • The difference between Von Ahn's work and that before it is quite simple: he dresses everything up as a game.

      Games are addictive, and this is why his projects (like the ESP Game) have continued, whereas others have faded away. It's not rocket/computer scie

  • 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 mov

  • Yeah, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cjb658 (1235986) on Wednesday May 14, @08:28PM (#23412234)
    ...are they fun?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Entrinzikyl (715485)
      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
    • 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.

    • Re:Computers aren't getting smarter... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by xenocide2 (231786) on Wednesday May 14, @07:58PM (#23411950) Homepage
      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. [google.com] Go watch it.

    • Hehe, their news page also has a video of the group using water balloons to wash a car.

      Nice way to put a dent in the hood. Then they can play "Bodyshop Bill Blues" or "PleaseYourHonourItWasJustAGame!!!"

    • 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".

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