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May 14, 2008, 04:49 PM ET
Games With a Purpose: Have Fun While Educating Computers
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science have offered a new group of “games with a purpose”: games that are fun for humans and that also “teach” computers skills like how to identify objects or pieces of music. They are posted on a new Web site, gwap.com, where users can keep track of their scores and compete with others.
The games are:
• 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 • ESP Game, which displays images to two players who each try to guess words that the other player would use to describe the image
The first four games are new; ESP Game, also known as the Google Image Labeler, is a classic gwap.
One of lead developers of the games was Luis von Ahn, an assistant computer-science professor. He’s the same guy who created Captchas, those distorted letter puzzles used by Web sites to distinguish between human users and robots. Software engineers Mike Crawford and Edison Tan and graduate students Severin Hacker, Edith Law, and Bryant Lee also worked on the site.—Catherine Rampell
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