Game Garners Genius Grant

One of my dreams has always been to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Of course, to win the grant you first have to be a genius, which means that you have to be able to pass classes like calculus and physics, among others. In other words, you have to be smart. Sigh.

The second criteria for winning a MacArthur Foundation grant is that you have to have good ideas; that is, applying your "genius" to something (hopefully) practical. By both measures, Luis von Ahn, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist, is deserving of one of this year's genius grants.

What qualified von Ahn as a MacArthur recipient is an online, multi-player game he created that also makes the Internet more accessible to the visually impaired. The game, called Phetch, is an Internet scavenger hunt in which players use a search engine to look for images that fit certain descriptions. In the process, they produce and verify captions for unlabeled images from the Web. These captions can then be used to enhance the Web-browsing experience of blind people.

Phetch is one of several "games with a purpose" that von Ahn has developed. The first such game, The ESP Game produced key words for images that could be used to aid image searches. Peekaboom, produces images with objects labeled and highlighted in a way that could be used to train computer vision systems..

Phetch, which von Ahn developed with students Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia, and Ruoran Liu, is designed for three to five players. The narrator writes a description of an image that has been randomly retrieved from a set of 1 million images from the Web; only the narrator can see the image. The other players ("searchers") use a special browser to search for it within that set of a million images. Each round lasts five minutes. Narrators receive points for each successful search and lose points if they pass on describing images believed to be too difficult. The first seeker to find each image receives points and becomes the narrator for the next round. In pilots, players spend an average of 32 minutes with the game and some have played for 10 hours or more in a single session. von Ahn and crew calculate that 5000 people could produce explanatory descriptions of all of the images indexed by Google in just 10 months.

Congratulations to Professor von Ahn for a job well done. And as for my chance at a genius grant, well, there's always next year.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:02 AM  Permalink