GWAP finally launches!

Luis von Ahn, the brains behind captchas (the nonsense codes that verify your mortality when registering on websites), is back with his latest, and even more ambitious creation, GWAP.com. GWAP (Games With A Purpose) is a collection of several fun "games," which are actually clever artificial intelligence projects disguised as addictive online games.

In each activity, you are paired with a partner, and directed to complete a series of tasks. The better you are, the more points you get (and the better the data the site collects). Tag a Tune, for example, instructs you and your partner to listen to a series of notes and describe them. By comparing the answers, the computer learns which descriptors are more common, and therefore learns to recognize the tunes itself.

Other games have similar ends, allowing partner pairs to describe images and words based on certain restrictions. The odd game out is called "Matchin," whose sole task is picking the more appealing of two pictures. This will help the computer learn what humans consider attractive, one of the most subjective and difficult things to teach a machine.

Check it out and sign up!

GWAP