Micro Opportunities - No. 17

A regular fortnightly-ish feature, highlighting a specific micro volunteer action with either a 'do good', 'green' or advocacy flavour.

'Do Good' Action - Play Games That Contribute to Research Projects

gwap

gwap has on offer 7 online games that simply tasks a human brain to perform menial tasks for the benefit of a computer, by turning your gameplay data into artificial intelligence that a supercomputer can crunch and then put to use in real-world applications.

When you log in to a game, you are partnered with a remote peer that is being presented the same tasks as you are, whether it's finding a dog in a picture or deciding whether or not a baby moose is cuter than whatever image is presented on your screen. Their system uses our collective responses to better perform difficult computing problems, such as identifying objects in a photograph.

There are seven games to keep you from being productive today: ESP (a game where you guess what the other person is typing after looking at a photo), Tag a tune (think name that tune), Verbosity (think Pictionary with words), Squigl (trace stuff), Matchin (guess what photo your peer likes best), Flipit (find pairs of similar images) and PopVideo (match what your peer sees and hears).

Play a game, computers get smarter, everyone benefits.

Website: http://www.gwap.com/gwap/
Time taken: From a couple of minutes to whenever you get bored!
Impact: Brings the world a little closer to having a truly intelligent computer. Skynet (from Terminator) has got nothing to fear - at the moment!
Cost: Nothing
Similar-ish sites: The FACTory, Foldit

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