Teaching Computers (And Getting Free Labor) By Making It All Into A Big Game

from the making-research-fun dept

Two years ago, we wrote about a CMU researcher who has created a silly game online to get lots of people to describe images for him, in an attempt to make a better image search system. That game, the ESP Game, has apparently remained quite popular -- and that's taught the game's creator an important lesson not necessarily about image searching, but about how to convince people to do labor for you for free. The same guy has now launched another online game designed to get more free labor out of people who are simply trying to kill time. The latest game, Peekaboom, builds off of the results of the ESP Game, and is designed to get people to highlight specific areas of an image. The results, apparently, will be useful in teaching computers how to pick certain elements out of a photograph. However, the game players don't necessarily know that (or need to know it). They just have a silly game they can play for a while. However, this will save researchers a ridiculous amount of time, by not forcing them to highlight the parts of images themselves. Now if only I could create a game to make people do my daily work for me...