CMU Professor Says Computers Need People to Get Smarter
Posted on: Thursday, 15 May 2008, 00:00 CDT
By Mark Houser
Today you have a chance to give something back to your computer.
The machines ask nothing in return for all the Googling, Web browsing, solitaire and other pursuits we subject them to -- and Luis von Ahn thinks we ought to be bigger than that.
The Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor, whose work has earned him awards, honors and corporate licensing agreements, launches a Web page today that masquerades as a repository of innocent, time-wasting games. But the site's name, gwap.com, hints at the underlying point of it all.
These are Games With A Purpose -- namely, advancing the state of computer artificial intelligence.
"That is my goal in life, to make (computers) smarter than we are, so that we don't have to do anything." said von Ahn, 29. "People worry about computers becoming really smart and taking over the world. But the reality is they're really stupid, and they've already taken over the world. We can't live without them."
His goal is to harness the brainpower of millions of Internet users to tutor computers on the things they can't figure out on their own. And von Ahn has parlayed it into a faculty post, a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" and hundreds of thousands more research dollars from Microsoft and the Heinz Endowments, among others.
Von Ahn's first foray was the ESP Game, which Google uses under the title Image Locator. Two players see a random photo and type words to describe it. The sooner they type the same word, the more points they get.
All the while, computers are logging those descriptions. They make handy tags for image search engines. But more than that, players are voluntarily assembling a database that computer vision researchers can use to teach machines to understand images.
The gwap.com page features the ESP Game and four other two- player mini-games designed by von Ahn and his nine-person CMU team. In one game, players trace people or things in a photo to see how closely their tracings match. In another, players describe a music clip to guess if they're listening to the same thing.
Perhaps even more esoteric is the game Matchin, which asks players to pick which of a pair of photos they like best.
"Matchin teaches computers what people like, and what is beautiful," said Mike Crawford, the project's chief engineer.
Today is not the most convenient launch date for von Ahn, a citizen of Guatemala who flew to Panama on Tuesday for a conference. Crawford, whom he recruited from Australia, is getting married in three weeks and taking a long honeymoon. Von Ahn said he can't wait that long, but he can't launch without Crawford.
Meanwhile, von Ahn and his fiancee, fellow CMU professor Laura Dabbish, have yet to set a wedding date. But they do spend a lot of time playing Matchin, he said, and are learning a bit about their compatibility.
"She really likes dogs. I like cars, I guess," he said.
As to whether dogs or cars are more beautiful, the computers might have to decide for themselves.
(c) 2008 Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
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