GWAP

Games With A Purpose

Check out GWAP. 

You get matched up with another player in various games (guessing a secret word, describing a song, etc).  The data that's collected is used by Carnegie Mellon to make computers "smarter."  Computers are good at indexing pages of text, but they aren't so good at describing what is seen and/or heard in a video or audio file.  There are some things that humans are just better suited for.  So if you and I (and a thousand other people) hear a Bon Jovi song play thirty seconds into a video and we type "Bon Jovi" and "Dead or Alive" that information can be used to index the video and improve a search engine's video results. 

It's not clear exactly how this data will be used.  Will it be sold/licensed to Google or Microsoft?  Will CMU release their own killer search engine?  I don't know.  But the games are pretty damn addicting.  (And that's a great way to get us to work for them for free.)

Oh, and the Gender Guesser still needs some work.  95% chance that I'm female?  C'mon.  I didn't even click on any of the images with kids in them.