Harnessing Video Game Power for Good - Extra Sensory Perception
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There's nothing supernatural about Luis von Ahn's form of extra sensory perception. That's because it's not a controversial mental talent; it's a game created by the Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist back in 2003. The game requires two players, who are each shown the same image. Each one guesses how the other person will describe it. When the guesses match, that word or phrase is used to annotate the picture.
There is a real point to this game. Computers are bad at guessing what is actually in an image, though they're getting better. And there are more images on the Internet without any kind of annotation than you can imagine. There are so many, in fact, that Google bought a license from Professor von Ahn's team back in 2006 to create Google Image Labeler. It helps the search engine return better results for online images. Here's a screen shot from a recent game:
Some images, as you can see, designate certain words as off-limits, which makes it a little more difficult. You always have the option to pass, but you have to wait for your partner to pass as well before you can go on to the next image. And you score points for an exact match. For this image, my partner and I matched on the word “nature,” scoring 140 points.
The games are time-limited, which is just as well. Most people don't seem to find this particular game of more than casual interest; diverting enough to kill a little time, sure, but not something you'd play passionately like Halo 3. Professor van Ahn admits that there are about one million registered users (you can play Google Image Labeler as a “guest” rather than a registered user), but only about a fifth of them play it regularly.
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