Wired Science

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.