Designing games with a purpose

Games with a purpose (GWAP) focus on improving artificial-intelligence algorithms. The ESP Game is a GWAP in which people provide meaningful, accurate labels for images on the Web as a side effect of playing the game. Other GWAPs include Peekaboom, which locates objects within images, Phetch, which annotates images with descriptive paragraphs. The ESP Game, introduced in 2003, and its successors represent the first seamless integration of game play and computation. The Open Mind Initiative is a worldwide research endeavor developing intelligent software by leveraging human skills to train computers. It collects information from regular Internet users, and feeds it to machine-learning algorithms. The GWAP approach is characterized by three motivating factors that include an increasing proportion of the world's population has access to the Internet, certain tasks are impossible for computers but easy for humans, and people spend lots of time playing games on computers.