Big Switch author Nicholas Carr writes in his blog the Loom about Von Ahn’s Gwap:
As The Register notes, a new site was launched this week, by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, that aims to entice humans into playing simple games that will help computers get smarter. The site, called Gwap (an acronym for “games with a purpose”), is the brainchild of computer scientist Luis von Ahn (who also cofathered the Captcha). “We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see,” he explains. “But that shouldn’t matter to the players because it turns out these games are super fun.”
Comments
@ 16:21
The Verbosity game has been hacked. Try playing by giving your partner ridiculous clues (such as “cheat” and “scam). Your partner will still guess the word you’re describing (and variations of it before it gets it correct). What? How is this possible?!
@ 02:19
We’ve recently released a collaborative game similar to the von Ahn work that aims to collect judgements on anaphoric coreference. It’s not as inherently interesting a task as tagging images or music, however the results could be just as useful for text summarisation and search engines.
To play the game and find out more information visit http://www.phrasedetectives.org