A research group at Carnegie Mellon University debuted [via Slashdot] a new website dedicated to harnessing the gaming power of users to advance computer science. Today, the group launched gwap.com (Games With A Purpose). The objective of the site is to take tasks that computers are unable to perform adequately and present them to humans in the form of a game.
According to one of the researchers:
"There are a lot of things that computers cannot do, but we'd somehow like to get them done," said Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science. "So what we're doing is getting humans to do it for us."
One example of a task computers are not entirely suited to currently is performing searches of music based on mood. If, for example, you were a depressed young emo soul with black eyeliner and a spike collar, you might type in "depressing music" as a search in Google. Unless some human conveniently compiled a list of depressing songs (and, let's be realistic, there's some other emo kid out there with way too much time on his hands who has already done that), you're probably just going to get a list of songs with the word depressing in the lyrics or the title. And that's just not what you're looking for. So "Tag a Tune" on gwap.com has users come up with descriptors for songs that are played.
Those these aren't the sort of games that generally appeal the hardcore, they are precisely the sort of fun parlor room games that my mother might adore:
ESP, in which opposing players are shown a picture and try to guess what words the other player will use to describe the image. The game's goal is to help improve image searches on the Internet by creating descriptions of uncaptioned images. The game has already been licensed by Google as Google Image Labeler.
Matchin, in which opposing players are shown the two images and asked to choose which one they like best. The more the players choose the same image, the more points they rack up. The goal is to help computers recognize what images people would prefer to see when they are searching for pictures on the Web.
Squigl, where two players are given a word describing part of an image and must trace what the word is describing. Points are awarded based on how similarly the players traced the image. The goal is to help computers more easily recognize images.
If you want to advance the cause of science, go over to gwap.com right now. That way, when your mom yells at you for not doing anything with your life, you can tell her that you're teaching computers how to think. Just pray SkyNet doesn't go live.
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