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Original air date:
12.19.07
Inventing Guilt-free Computer Games
Without a doubt, computer games are addictive; after hours of playing, it’s easy to feel guilty for not doing something more useful with your time. But what if computer games were useful in that they helped solve intractable problems?
That's the idea that Luis von Ahn came up with years ago—and he's developed a handful of clever new games to show for it.
Von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, invented the field of "computer computation," in which the computational ability of humans solve problems that computers cannot. As an example, von Anh inveted CAPTCHAS, those twisty letter sequences that websites sometimes ask you to type out. They ensure that only humans are able to create e-mail addresses and perform other online tasks, as CAPTCHAS take advantage of the fact that computers have trouble identifying objects presented in certain ways.
There are plenty of other things that only humans can do; unfortunately, though, some of them are tedious. Take the fact that internet images are poorly tagged—a problem that makes image searches difficult and causes people to accidentally stumble across pornography sites. Who wants to spend their day tagging images to solve this problem? No one—until now. Von Ahn has come up with a fun solution in the form of a computer game called "The ESP Game" in which players rack up points by providing creative labels for images. The game, which has so far collected over 10 million web image labels, improves the reliability of image searches and helps web browsers block pornography.
In another of von Ahn's games, “Peekaboom”, people help locate objects within images. By playing the game, people improve the field of artificial intelligence, because they provide computer scientists with data they can use to improve computer vision algorithms.
Von Ahn joins Ziya Tong in the WIRED SCIENCE studio to talk more about his research, his games, and the field of computer computation. After all, anyone who gives us an excuse to play computer games—and a reason to not feel guilty about it—is worth having a good long chat with.
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12.19.07 4:55 PM PST
anonymous
It's "human computation", not "computer computation" as it says in the text above as I write this.
12.19.07 5:15 PM PST
Shadow703793
CAPTCHAS can now be broken by computers. The hackers at Defcon did this about a year ago.
12.19.07 5:21 PM PST
anonymous
Very clever stuff, taking the "Turing test" idea that shows the weaknesses of computers and harnessing the strengths it implies humans have. Also, doing it in such a way that people can actually enjoy the tasks.
12.21.07 7:27 PM PST
jason ingram
I tried the ESP game but it does not work on my mac. Perhaps its overloaded due to the tv show last night!
I love this science program, and I wish it was not on so late. Why don't they play this over one of those boring prime time talking shows?
12.22.07 10:31 PM PST
Archivist
I enjoyed hearing about the effort by Louis von Ahn to improve techniques for digitizing books. Ahn helped develop the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) steganography project, to asist with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when it comes to deciphering scanned text that is difficult for computers to "read". These texts with missing or faded writing might include rare books or archival documents. Does this include items in the Google Print project? What about other archival documents being digitized that fall outside of Google's project? And how about scanned archival images that could use tags like the ESP game hopes to do?-- Admin of Archivopedia.
12.30.07 4:38 PM PST
Sam Smith
Is the dititizing word for books game on the internet somewhere?
7.10.09 4:42 AM PDT
Бapaxa
Автору нужно памятник постаить за такое!:)
7.21.09 6:43 PM PDT
Winter
Да... Хорошую информацию трудно добыть. (А сделать с ней что-нибудь – ещё труднее) :)
7.21.09 7:49 PM PDT
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7.28.09 6:16 PM PDT
Ярослав Карасев
Да таков наш современный мир и боюсь с этим ни чего невозможно поделать:)
7.29.09 10:22 AM PDT
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10.13.09 8:58 PM PDT
колонне
Слабо моё имя расшифровать ec1fba0636312eb01992461d9278677e ?
10.22.09 10:43 PM PDT
пyпo
Хорошая статья. Обязательно буду ждать продолжения. Тема конечно же интересна всем.
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