This work by Jason M. Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Header image credit seakwenby.
Twitter button by Randa Clay Design.
I don’t have a lot to say about the mechanics behind it, since I’m not privy to them, but my former project GWAP is testing out a gender guesser. Based on your preferences for 10 pairs of images, it seems to achieve decent accuracy guessing your gender. At least of the 10 or so times that I took it, it got it wrong twice.
GWAP's new gender guessing game
Figured I’d post this promo video the GWAP group did. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to participate in the filming of it since I was visiting my dad and family in Ohio for the first time after many years. So unfortunate in that I missed the filming, but the alternative was worth it. Johnny Lee had a not insignificant role in the making of the video, I believe. Check out his stuff if you haven’t, he’s doing some pretty amazing things with Wii remotes.
Today is the official opening day of GWAP: Games with a Purpose. This is one of two research projects I have been working on for the past few months, though my involvement with GWAP so far has only been in the form of attending meetings, minor testing, and offering my sage gaming advice (and by sage, I mean the herb). GWAP is the next phase in Luis von Ahn‘s human computation project. If you visit and play some games, not only will you be rewarded with a good time, but you’ll be helping science! Science needs you. To play games. Now.
Artificial intelligence has come a long way, but humans are still far better at computers at simple, everyday tasks. We can quickly pick out the key points in a photo, we know what words mean and how they are related, we can identify various elements in a piece of music, etc. All of these things are still very difficult for computers. So why not funnel some of the gazillion hours we waste on solitaire into something useful? Luis has already launched a couple websites that let people play games while solving these problems. Perhaps you’ve noticed the link to Google Image Labeler on Google Image Search? That idea came from his ESP game (which is now on GWAP).
What researchers need to help them develop better algorithms for computers to do these tasks is data. The more data the better. Statistical machine translation has improved quite a bit over the past few years, in large part due to an increased amount of data. This is the reason why languages that are spoken by few people (even those spoken by as few as several million) still don’t have machine translation tools: there is just not enough data. More data means more food for these algorithms which means better results. And if results don’t improve, then we have learned something else.
Multiple billions of hours are spent each year on computer games. If even a small fraction of that time were spent performing some task that computers aren’t yet able to do, we could increase the size of the data sets available to researchers enormously. Luis puts this all a lot better than I can, and fortunately, you can watch him on YouTube (below).
So, check it out already.
They have compiled a great list of nutty captchas caught in the wild. The best is certainly the Russian one, as many others have agreed. Captchas are particularly interesting to me since it looks like I’m going to be working with Dr. Luis von Ahn next semester on the GWAP project (games with a purpose).
The Mendicant Bug 
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