{"id":68,"date":"2007-03-15T22:35:04","date_gmt":"2007-03-16T03:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/?p=68"},"modified":"2007-03-16T05:41:24","modified_gmt":"2007-03-16T10:41:24","slug":"humans-vs-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/2007\/03\/15\/humans-vs-computers\/","title":{"rendered":"Humans vs Computers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been searching through Google Video looking for good presentations that I can use as resources.\u00a0 I am mainly looking for presentation styles, but much of the content has been interesting.\u00a0 Here is one I stumbled across today.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/p>\n

Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is talking about Human Computation.\u00a0 He looks at several things that computers just can\u2019t figure out yet.\u00a0 One of those things is a captcha.\u00a0 This is a term coined by Prof Ahn.\u00a0 You have probably seen a few of them during your browsing.\u00a0 They look like this:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Humans can read the letters, but computers cannot.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the first really interesting statistic from the presentation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

9 Billion Human-Hours of Solitaire were played in 2003.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is billion with a B.\u00a0 In comparison, the Empire State Building took 7 million (with an M) human-hours to build.\u00a0 That is equivalent to 6.8 hours of the world playing Solitaire.<\/p>\n

Ahn\u2019s goal is to put this wasted Solitaire time to good use.\u00a0 He has devised a program that is fun and competitive that will help correctly label pictures on the web.\u00a0 Before showing the game, he went to Google Images and searched for \u201cdog\u201d.\u00a0 There were a lot of dogs, a rabbit and a guy wearing a blue suite.\u00a0 This is because the image identification process cannot analyze the picture to identify a dog.\u00a0 Instead, Google relies on the file name and words around the picture to try and identify a picture.<\/p>\n

The ESP Game<\/a> solves this problem.\u00a0 The game pairs two anonymous people and shows them both the same picture.\u00a0 As quickly as possible both players (without seeing what the other is typing) must try to type a word that identifies the picture.\u00a0 As soon as the two players have a common word, points are scored.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the twist.\u00a0 Certain words are \u201ctaboo\u201d words.\u00a0 Generally those are the obvious things in the picture.\u00a0 It requires the players to look at all the items in the picture in choosing descriptive words.<\/p>\n

The end result is a very accurate list of descriptive words for each picture in the database.\u00a0 Plus the players can get millions of points (the top ten are listed on the site).<\/p>\n

Ahn estimated that all the pictures in Google\u2019s database could be accurately tagged in about two months if about 5000 people were to play this game around the clock.\u00a0 He pointed out games in Yahoo and MSN that average 5000 players all the time.\u00a0 The whole project is an interesting way of using human brain power.<\/p>\n

Once you master the ESP Game, give Peekaboom<\/a> a try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been searching through Google Video looking for good presentations that I can use as resources.\u00a0 I am mainly looking for presentation styles, but much of the content has been interesting.\u00a0 Here is one I stumbled across today. Luis von … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[336],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edtech","tag-edtech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trustyetc.com\/trustyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}