Geekfoolery

It’s pretty much a given that worldwide, kids are fountains of boundless energy that could solve global warming if we could just direct that energy into something useful, instead of say, Pokémon. Some folks got the idea and came up with the Play Pump for villages in Africa. It’s an ordinary piece of kid’s playground equipment that spins around, except it’s attached to a water pump. This frees up the manual labor or draft animals or for the lucky few, the gas to run the pump, and turns kid’s play into useful work that helps the whole village. Brilliant.

What if there were something that could help the global village, those of us who use the Internet? That’s what The ESP Game and Phetch are for. The ESP game puts you head-to-head with another person logged in, and you are both shown a picture randomly sampled from somewhere on the web. The game is for both of you to come up with a word that applies to the picture as a tag of some kind. The program automatically picks out a couple of obvious choices so the game isn’t too easy. When you and your unseen partner enter the same word for the picture, you get a match, some points, and you move on to the next picture. The more pix you agree on, the more points you get.

The Carnegie Mellon team has another game called Phetch. In this round, you’re randomly assigned to a group, one of whom is the describer, the rest of whom are guessers. The describer sees the picture, and has to describe it to the rest of the team to see if they can locate it with search terms. When someone matches the image, a new search begins.

The games are actually very addictive. There are elements of the old TV game show Password, some charades, a bit of Pictionary® as well. The randomness of the pictures keeps the game challenging, and it makes you think as well.

But what is the point of it all? How does this online game turn the water pump? It’s matter of image tagging. Online search has grown by leaps and bounds, but image search is still a hit-or-miss affair. If a file has a non-descriptive name, and is not tagged in any way, then chances are, Google and Yahoo’s spiders will never find it in their crawl through the Internet. These games create tags for images as a by-product; the goal is better image searching on the web.

That’s a great cause, and in the end we’ll all benefit. But even better, they’re fun games. I know this because, I, Mr. Alex, did not find these games by myself. My daughter, a young Geekfoolion in training, pointed them out to me. Just goes to show that African villages aren’t the only ones who know how to get their young ‘uns to do a little of their work for them…

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