Google Image Labeler, the ESP Game, and Human-Computer Symbiosis

Google Image Labeler, the ESP Game, and Human-Computer Symbiosis: "By tim In comments on my previous entry, Stephen Rondeau pointed out that Google Image Labeler appears to be based on the ESP Game developed by Professor Luis von Ahn of CMU. An anonymous commenter pointed to the video of Luis von Ahn's tech talk at Google on July 26, 2006. The tech talk was fascinating, both because there was no hint in it that Google was about to announce something based on von Ahn's work -- the talk is all about his previously published games -- and for the actual thought-provoking content, which gives a lot of background on the design of this kind of game, and in general, the idea of harnessing humans to work as program components via games. Luis started out his talk by looking at Captchas. Most of this was familiar material, although he has a great definition of a Captcha: 'A program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass, but that current computer programs cannot pass.' (This is an interesting variation on the Turing test, in which humans g"