Paul Raven @ 19-05-2008
I expect the majority of Futurismic readers don’t really need an excuse to play computer games, but sometimes its nice to know that what looks like a waste of time is actually doing something productive - in this case, helping to develop artificial intelligence software. [via Roland Piquepaille] [image by Cayusa]
Computer scientist Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University (who was involved in the development of CAPTCHA tests, fact-fans!) has a website full of free-to-play GWAPs - “games with a purpose”. The purposes include building databases of image descriptions and collecting factual knowledge to improve image web searches and provide brain-food for artificial intelligences, respectively. The former one might sound familiar - Google licensed it as Google Image Labeler last year.
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Tomas Martin @ 15-12-2007
Google has announced a new wikipedia-like project, entitled ‘knol’. Short for knowledge, the project aims to have an encyclopedia type experience but with more emphasis on the author, rather than anonymous multiple contributors. There will not be editorial contributions from Google, but authors including ads will get revenue.
An example knol has been put up on the Google blog. Google says that the emphasis will be on large numbers of posts, ranked by users and views to encourage quality. Peer review seems to encourage good writers to become better rated and more successful. Added to the potential to earn money, this endeavour could provide a good potential way to create a freelance online writer business model. It looks like Knol will be less comprehensive/consistent across the entire volume of data than Wikipedia, but with better quality at the top end. It’s a similar model to Mahalo, only with the backing of perhaps the biggest internet company out there.
[via boing boing, image is the example of a Google Knol]
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