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Play games, make computers smarter, assist artificial intelligence to subjugate human race |
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Written by Brian Williams
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Friday, 16 May 2008 |
A new website, GWAP.com, from the folks that brought us CAPTCHA (designed to discriminate between dumb computers and people) and the ESP Game, also licensed as Google Image Labeler (designed to smarten computer programs to distinguish things in and about images), are aiming to make computers more intelligent by having you teach the the computer nuances of the human experience through game play. GWAP is an acronym for "Games With A Purpose." The idea is that you play and the computer keeps track of the things you can discern from images, music and language.
To play these games, you and a partner are presented with an image or song, then you describe the sample in some fashion. There is the original ESP game where the two of you write as many 'tags' for an image as you can within a time limit. 'Tag a Tune' is a game where you and your partner hear sound clips and describe them, then based on your partner's description you have to guess whether you're listening to the same tune. There is another game where you guess a secret word based on your partner's description or vice versa, one where you trace the outline of the subject in an image to teach the computer to isolate the subject from its background, and another game to simply reflect your taste in which image is more appealing.
"But wait," you say, "couldn't I sabotage this attempt to hasten the inevitable overthrow of the human race by conspiring with my partner to mislabel the examples given?" Nope, sorry. You are randomly assigned a partner over the internet and given no way to communicate, except through the game. I'm not too concerned though. As far as I'm concerned, future machine domination is a small price to pay for better search results now.
[GWAP.com, TheRegister, Wikipedia, Google]
Brian Williams, a TheSequitur.com senior editor and systems director, studies sociology at Morehead State University.
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