Human-based computation game
A human-based computation game or game with a purpose is a human-based computation technique of outsourcing steps within a computational process to humans in an entertaining way.
Luis von Ahn first proposed the idea of "human algorithm games", or games with a purpose, in order to harness human time and energy for addressing problems that computers cannot yet tackle on their own. He believes that human intellect is an important resource and contribution to the enhancement of computer processing and human computer interaction. He argues that games constitute a general mechanism for using brainpower to solve open computational problems. In this technique, human brains are compared to processors in a distributed system, each performing a small task of a massive computation. However, humans require an incentive to become part of a collective computation. Online games are used as a means to encourage participation in the process.
The tasks presented in these games are usually trivial for humans, but difficult for computers. These tasks include labeling images, transcribing ancient texts, common sense or human experience based activities, and more. Human-based computation games motivate people through entertainment rather than an interest in solving computation problems. This makes GWAPs more appealing to a larger audience. GWAPs can be used to help build the semantic web, annotate and classify collected data, crowdsource general knowledge, and improving other general computer processes.
GWAPs have a vast range of applications in variety of areas such as security, computer vision, Internet accessibility, adult content filtering, and Internet search. In applications such as these, games with a purpose have lowered the cost of annotating data and increased the level of human participation.
History
The first human-based computation game or games with a purpose was created in 2004 by Luis von Ahn. The idea was that ESP would use human power to help label images. The game is a two player agreement game and relied on players to come up with labels for images and attempt to guess what labels a partner was coming up with. ESP used microtasks, simple tasks that can be solved quickly without the need of any credentials.Game Design Principles
''Output Agreement Game''
Games with a purpose categorized as output agreement games are microtask games where players are matched into pairs and randomly assigned partners attempt to match output with each other given a shared visible input. ESP is an example of an output agreement game.''Inversion Problem Games''
Given an image, the ESP Game can be used to determine what objects are in the image, but cannot be used to determine the location of the object in the image. Location information is necessary for training and testing computer vision algorithms, so the data collected by the ESP Game is not sufficient. Thus, to deal with this problem, a new type of microtask game known as inversion problem games were introduced by creator of ESP, von Ahn in 2006. Peekaboom extended upon ESP and had players associate labels with a specific region of an image. In inversion problem games, two players are randomly paired together. One is assigned as the describer and the other is the guesser. The describer is given an input, which the guesser must reproduce given hints from the describer. In Peekaboom, for example, the describer slowly reveals small sections of an image until the guesser correctly guesses the label provided to the describer.''Input Agreement Games''
In input-agreement games two randomly paired players are each given an input that is hidden from the other player. Player inputs will either match or be different. The goal of these games is for players to tag their input such that the other player can determine whether or not the two inputs match. In 2008, Edith L. M. Law created the input-agreement game called TagATune. In this game, players label sound clips. In TagATune, players describe sound clips and guess if their partner's sound clip is the same as their own given their partner's tags.''Macrotask Games''
Macrotask games, unlike microtask games, contain complex problems that are usually left to experts to solve. In 2008, a macrotask game called Foldit was created by Seth Cooper. The idea was that players would attempt to fold a three-dimensional representation of a protein. This task was a hard problem for computers to automate completely. Locating the biologically relevant native conformation of a protein is a difficult computational challenge given the very large size of the search space. By gamification and implementation of user friendly versions of algorithms, players are able to perform this complex task without much knowledge of biology.Examples
''Apetopia''
The Apetopia game helps determining perceived color differences. Players' choices are used to model better color metrics. The Apetopia game, which was launched by University of Berlin, is designed to help scientists understand perceived color differences. This game is intended to provide data on how the shades of color are perceived by people in order to model the best color parameters.Artigo
Artigo is a Web platform currently offering six artwork annotation games as well as an artwork search engine in English, French, and German. Three of Artigo's games, the ARTigo game, ARTigo Taboo, and TagATag, are variations of Luis von Ahn's ESP game. Three other games of the Artigo platform, Karido, Artigo-Quiz, and Combino, have been conceived so as to complement the data collected by the three aforementioned ESP game variations.Artigo's search engine relies on an original tensor latent semantic analysis.
As of September 2013, Artigo had over 30,000 artworks mostly of Europe and of the "long 19th century", from the Promotheus Image Archive, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany, the University Museum of Contemporary Art, campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. From 2008 through 2013, Artigo has collected over 7 million of tags, 180,000 players, and in average 150 players per day.
Artigo is a joint research endeavor of art historians and computer scientists aiming at both, developing an art work search engine and data analysis in art history.
ESP game
The first example was the ESP game, an effort in human computation originally conceived by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, which labels images. To make it an entertaining effort for humans, two players attempt to assign the same labels to an image. The game records the results of matches as image labels and the players enjoy the encounter because of the competitive and timed nature of it. To ensure that people do their best to accurately label the images, the game requires two people, who have only the image in common, to choose the same word as an image label. This discourages vandalism because it would be self-defeating as a strategy.The ESP game is a human-based computation game developed to address the problem of creating difficult metadata. The idea behind the game is to use the computational power of humans to perform a task that computers cannot by packaging the task as a game. It was originally conceived by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University. Google bought a licence to create its own version of the game in 2006 in order to return better search results for its online images. The license of the data acquired by Ahn's ESP Game, or the Google version, is not clear. Google's version was shut down on 16 September 2011 as part of the Google Labs closure in September 2011.
PeekaBoom
PeekaBoom is a web-based game that helps computers locate objects in images by using human gameplay to collect valuable metadata. Humans understand and are able to analyze everyday images with minimal effort, while computers have trouble with these basic visual tasks. Peekaboom has two main components: "Peek" and "Boom". Two random players from the Web participate by taking different roles in the game. When one player is Peek, the other is Boom. Peek starts out with a blank screen, while Boom starts with an image and a word related to it. The goal of the game is for Boom to reveal parts of the image to Peek. In the meantime, Peek can guess associated words with the revealed parts of the image. When Peek guesses words that are closer to the image, Boom can indicate whether Peek's guesses are hot or cold. When Peek correctly, the players gets points and then switch roles.EteRNA
is a game in which players attempt to design RNA sequences that fold into a given configuration. The widely varied solutions from players, often non-biologists, are evaluated to improve computer models predicting RNA folding. Some designs are actually synthesized to evaluate the actual folding dynamics and directly compare with the computer models.''Eyewire''
Eyewire is a game for finding the connectome of the retina.Foldit
has been gamified in games like Foldit, a game designed by the University of Washington, in which players compete to manipulate proteins into more efficient structures. A 2010 paper in science journal Nature credited Foldit's 57,000 players with providing useful results that matched or outperformed algorithmically computed solutions.Foldit, while also a GWAP, has a different type of method for tapping the collective human brain. This game challenges players to use their human intuition of 3-dimensional space to help with protein folding algorithms. Unlike the ESP game, which focuses on the results that humans are able to provide, Foldit is trying to understand how humans approach complicated 3 dimensional objects. By 'watching' how humans play the game, researchers hope to be able to improve their own computer programs. Instead of simply performing tasks that computers cannot do, this GWAP is asking humans to help make current machine algorithms better.
Guess the Correlation
Guess the Correlation is a game with a purpose challenging players to guess the true Pearson correlation coefficient in scatter plots. The collected data is used to study what features in scatter plots skew human perception of the true correlation. The game was developed by Omar Wagih at the European Bioinformatics Institute.''JeuxDeMots''
is a game aiming to build a large semantic network. People are asked to associate terms according to some instructions that are provided for a given word. The French version of the produced network contains so far more than 160 million relations between 2 million lexical items. The project was developed by academics of the Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier/Montpellier 2 University.''Nanocrafter''
Nanocrafter is a game about assembling pieces of DNA into structures with functional properties, such as logic circuits, to solve problems. Like Foldit, it is developed at the University of Washington.''OnToGalaxy''
OnToGalaxy is a game in which players help to acquire common sense knowledge about words. As implemented as a space shooter, OnToGalaxy in its design quite different from other human computation games. The game was developed by Markus Krause at the University of Bremen.''Phrase Detectives''
Phrase Detectives is an "annotation game" geared towards lovers of literature, grammar and language. It lets users indicate relationships between words and phrases to create a resource that is rich in linguistic information. Players are awarded with points for their contributions and are featured on a leader board. It was developed by academics Jon Chamberlain, Massimo Poesio and Udo Kruschwitz at the University of Essex.''Phylo''
The Phylo allows gamers to contribute to the greater good by trying to decode the code for genetic diseases. While playing the game and aligning the colored squares, one is helping the scientific community get a step closer to solving the age-old problem of multiple sequence alignment. The problem of multiple sequence alignment is too big for computers to handle. The goal is to understand how and where the function of an organism is encoded in the DNA. The game explains that "a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA or protein to identify regions of similarity".''Play to Cure: Genes in Space''
Play to Cure™: Genes in Space is a mobile game that uses the collective force of players to analyse real genetic data to help with cancer research.''Quantum Moves''
Quantum Moves is a dexterity and spatial problem solving game, where players move slippery particles across quantum space. Players' solutions on various levels are used to program and fine tune a real quantum computer at Aarhus University.The game was first developed as a graphical interface for quantum simulation and education in 2012. In 2013 it was released to the public in a user-friendly form, and has been continually updated throughout 2014.