Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Spending hours randomly tagging photos, describing songs, and outlining objects sure doesn't sound fun, and certainly doesn't sound like something you would do for free. But, there is a growing need to transfer human intelligence to machine intelligence in order make smarter tools. In order to get humans to participate, FUN is not a luxury, but is the key to success.

Enter GWAP (games with a purpose), a new site launched by scientists in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. It is spearheaded by the computer scientist Luis von Ahn, father of the CAPTCHA technology. The site features a series of highly addictive games that match users together randomly in challenges that are fun, but also serve a purpose.

"We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see. But that shouldn't matter to the players because it turns out these games are super fun." - Luis von Ahn

The site currently includes five games, although more are on the way. The ESP Game should be familiar to anyone who has played around on Google Image Labeler. The four other games include:

• Matchin, a game in which players judge which of two images is more appealing, is designed to eventually enable image searches to rank images based on which ones look the best.
• Tag a Tune, in which players describe songs so that computers can search for music other than by title - such as happy songs or love songs.
• Verbosity, a test of common sense knowledge that will amass facts for use by artificial intelligence programs.
• Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs to help teach computers to more readily recognize objects.

The games also include other small but powerful tricks to keep users engaged and active, including top rankings, player recognition levels, and integrated online chat with your mystery partner after the challenge.

Marta Strickland