Semi-Psychic Fun, Paradigms, the Internet, and you

It's a game. It's a game that you could reasonably call the "ESP Game." It's a research project. It's a way to get you help label images throughout the Internet.

You and someone you never get to meet are looking at an image from somewhere on the web. Simultaneously, you both type any word that you can possibly associate with it at all. You keep typing until you type a word that your anonymous partner has also typed. Then you score and get to see the next image.

It's one of those slighly weird fun experiences. You never get to meet your partner. There really are no right answers. And, if you're in to keeping score, you can get significantly amazed and abashed at how some people are apparently getting really high scores, somehow sensing, so to speak, what their partners are thinking.

This game comes to us courtesy of the Carnegie-Mellon institute. Which right away makes you think that there's even something more going on. And in deed, there is.

While you're so merrily trying to psychically align, your answers (words) are helping to give names to the images.

"Labeling an image," they explain, "means associating word descriptions to it, as shown below. Computer programs can't yet determine the contents of arbitrary images, but the ESP game provides a novel method of labeling them: players get to have fun as they help us determine their contents. If the ESP game is played as much as other popular online games, we estimate that all the images on the Web can be labeled in a matter of weeks!


guys
sitting
music
picture

Having proper labels associated to each image on the Internet would allow for very accurate image search, would improve the accessibility of the Web (by providing word descriptions of all images to visually impaired individuals), and would help users block inappropriate (e.g., pornographic) images from their computers."


What you have here may be a new paradigm for how to use the Internet as a research tool: make it a game that's fun enough, and people will beat your door into a mousetrap, as it were.


Thanks for this link go to the brilliant Ianus Keller, of Delft University Studiolabs, the very university from which my son just received his Ph. D.