Humans as Computing Devices

Louis von Ahn is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been studying the use of games to motivate people to do useful work. He refers to his tools as “Games with a Purpose” - very similar to “Serious Games”. However, his programs focus on image recognition and categorization. They create a playful environment in which two players compete to identify what is shown in a picture. The descriptions they type into the game are captured on a server and become the text descriptions of the images. Each image is used in a number of game rounds to validate that the descriptors applied are agreed upon by multiple players. In his experiments he finds that people played this game for many hours straight – some as many as 12 hours/day. My own experiments with my children showed the same engaging behavior with the games. Using his game and the number of players he has attracted he estimates that he could create tags for all of the images in Google Images in just 5 weeks.

This idea is huge. It uses a gaming environment to motivate people to do valuable work – for free. In the military it might be used to categorize all of the intelligence/reconnaissance imagery on file. It could also be used to train people to identify what is in the images.

I highly recommend watching his lecture (51 minutes) and playing the two games he has designed.

• Google Talk lecture
  
• ESP Game: http://www.espgame.org/
  
• Peek-a-Boom Game: http://www.peekaboom.org/