Stealing cycles from humans : A CMU student creates an online game that harnesses the cognitive ability of humans to create a special-purpose supercomputer.
It’s a simple game — players who visit the espgame Web site are automatically and anonymously paired up and shown photos or other images. Each player types in words that describe the image until, without seeing the other’s list, they have a match. Then they are shown another image and the game repeats. The less time it takes to match words, the higher the score.
As he sees it, the “Matrix” movies have it all wrong. Machines would never tap people as an energy source, because people actually consume energy. But they might well tap people for cognitive abilities that machines can’t duplicate.
A very interesting project, although I’m of the belief that true A.I. is not only possible, but probable given enough time and assuming we don’t implode as a species or push our environment beyond sustainability before the event occurs. Despite the mysteries of our self-awareness and cognition (and they are truly wondrous mysteries), the human brain is still uses physical capacitance to communicate, meaning that while there are a myriad of incredibly complex subsystems that compose what we think of when we talk about human thought, in theory, those subsystems could be mathematically reproducible because they follow a physical path. The problem is of course is that we have no direct observation into how those subsystems work because they travel at the speed of chemical reaction. Perhaps an interactive human debugger of some sort is in order?
Interestingly enough, the article cites an example of human ingenuity that demonstrates how hard it will be for machines to surpass us: the breaking of the CAPTCHA test
The CAPTCHA tests are simple for humans to pass, but hard for computers. A typical test features a word with fuzzy or distorted letters, or words overlapping each other, or a word superimposed on a complex background; visitors to the site are asked to type a word they see. Yahoo began using the CAPTCHAs on its Web registration form several years ago; other Web sites quickly copied the idea.
But at least one potential spammer managed to crack the CAPTCHA test. Someone designed a software robot that would fill out a registration form and, when confronted with a CAPTCHA test, would post it on a free porn site. Visitors to the porn site would be asked to complete the test before they could view more pornography, and the software robot would use their answer to complete the e-mail registration.
October 24th, 2003 at 2:30 am
Hey, I like ESPgame and very happy to find the reference at your site.
What do you conclude from the concept of the game?
Can be used for any other purpose?
For example… Reactions to the world events. or about people?
We may have massbiography for example.
October 26th, 2003 at 6:05 pm
In my opinion, the results can be very useful indeed, but only if applied to something practical. In this case, human answers are being used to fill the void that machine fuzzy logic cannot either through the limitations in programmer code or deficiencies in our understanding of more complex algorithms.
What’s apparent is that this game is being used to create working sets that deal with pattern recognition, something that was traditionally very difficult for programs to accomplish successfully. Both of us could draw a picture of a flower that may look completely different from each other, using a different style of drawing, but both of us could tell that they were flowers. Machines are great at telling you things are either equal or not equal, but have a hard time distinguishing that something is like another but are conceptually the same (like drawings of a flower) .
We now have things like handwriting recognition (Grafiti on the Palm, etc.) but anything more complex becomes problematic. Hence I think the coolness of this application.
>> For example… Reactions to the world events. or about people?
Actually, I think blogs fill this void nicely ;^)