Viraj's Weblog

This past week was a fairly interesting one. Let's start with the talks I attended.

The creator of the ESP Game gave a talk about human computation. Think brainpower vs CPU. The task of image recognition is something that humans are vastly superior in than machines. Take the task of trying to come up with keywords describing an image, something impossible for computers to do, and yet so simple for us humans. We can pay humans to label our images for us, in image-tagging sweatshops. But the speaker came up with a game that people will play for free and contribute their brainpower.

The idea is simple and involves 2 players. Show them a picture, and each one must come up with words describing the picture. When both players match on their words, they get points. Voila, you are now building a database of image keywords. Add some taboo words and things get even better. It's strangely addictive. The speaker talked of comments from players thinking they've found a soul-mate, because they always agree on words. Sadly (or rather, to prevent cheating) your opponent is anonymous. Now, how can we make a game to identify elements of a image, say a man in a picture of a park. With another game, Peekaboom. I have to admit these games are kinda fun.

Speaking of games, the next talk I attended was by Will Wright, creator of various Sim* games and the upcoming Spore. This talk was PACKED, and this guy is a genius. He demoed Spore and it is simply amazing. The creature creator interface was very cool and looks like something a Pixar animator would make for his children. I may just have to buy a PC for this game, which is like Masters of Orion meets evolution.