Mr. Alex recently wrote up a bit about the latest efforts to effectively and accurately tag images by making use of people’s desire to play games. Think of it as SETI @ Home, but instead you’re playing an online game head to head with some other random person on the Internet where you both try to guess the same word for a picture that you both see. There is a variant on this game as well that Carnegie Mellon runs. What I thought was most interesting though was Mr. Alex’s comparison of these online games to a real-life game played by kids in some countries in Africa on a merry-go-round that doubles as a water pump. Brilliant. So play can be used as a means to a different ends as well.
Read the full story over at Geekfoolery.com.