GWAP: New Games With a Purpose

Research, News

William Gibson, the well-known science-fiction author, is famous for saying, “The ‘Net is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.” Well, I always thought this was a great way to describe Luis von Ahn’s idea of “games with a purpose” — capturing the unique capabilities of people when they play games on the Internet, so as to make computers smarter and the World-Wide Web better.

Today, in a truly exciting development, Luis and his group have launched a new web site, gwap.com, sporting four new games plus the now-venerable ESP image-labeling game. I’ve been playing the games for the past couple of days, and I must say that they can be pretty addicting. (The site, being brand new, is still a bit shaky, but is pretty slick and works reasonably well already.)

Each game has the same general framework. Consider ESP. You start it up and it finds someone else on the Internet who also wants to play. You and your partner are shown the same image, and now the goal is to guess what word your partner is thinking, based on viewing the image. The faster you guess a word that your partner also guesses about you, the faster you score a point and are given the next image. The goal is to score as many points as possible in three minutes. Another game, called Squigl, is similar. In Squigl, you and your partner are shown the same image and asked to trace one of the objects or features in the image. (For example, “trace the dog in this picture”.) The more similar you and your partner’s traces are, the more points you get. Other games test music categorization, word association, and beauty.

The utterly brilliant thing about these and the other games is that they utilize the special abilities of people in order to make computers smarter. In ESP, for example, the matching words are used to label the images, for doing things like Google image search. For Squigl, it is clear that one use is highly sensible image segmentation (and for the words that are provided by ESP!). One of those truly rare and amazingly elegant ideas.

For the next year or so, Luis and his group are hoping to learn a lot more about these sorts of games, as part of a larger research agenda to understand “human computation”. With greater understanding, it might be possible to understand how to harness thousands or millions of people to solve all sorts of important problems. As this understanding solidifies, we hope to establish a major research focus here at Carnegie Mellon and other places.

Finally, it is worth mentioning how much fun Luis and his group seem to be having. They are getting lots of press coverage. (See the BBC coverage and today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, for example.) A list of the team members can be found on the gwap.com news page. One nice glimpse into the group is given by this short video. It explains, without the use of any words, the idea of “games with a purpose”.

Peter Lee @ May 14, 2008