Great Story On Captcha & Human Computation

Written by Igor Beuker on October 24th, 2007 |

Abstract tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software.

For the people that love social media, the wisdom of crowds or tag clouds, you should really see this great video of professor Luis Von Ahn. Luis describes very fast, but very funny, how games with a purpose help to create smart tags and how they can collect common-sense knowledge.

If you have seen the video, also try a tagging game at Peekaboom. It’s helps determine the location of objects. Or Verbosity the 2 player word guessing game, which collects common-sense knowledge. (Matthijs at Pixel Industries thanks for your tip)