Fun with Google's Image Labeler
LinkI have a new Internet addiction, and this time it has nothing to do with porn or shooting something. I am addicted to the Google Image Labeler. The gist of the "game" is to come up with a word or phrase that identifies a random picture. If your partner has the matching word or phrase you get points depending on how specific the word or phrase was. For example, words like "blue", "red", "sky", "ocean", "man" and "woman" are all worth only 50 points. While "ninja", "wrestler", and "dancing" are all worth 140 points. So if the picture is of a wrestler, you get more points - almost 3x as many - if you and your partner can match on "wrestler" as opposed to "man". The object being to try to get as many points as possible in two minutes. My high score so far has been just over 1,000 points. It has been an interesting experience to try to do a mind-meld across the Internet.
After the two minutes are up, you are shown the pictures again, and this time you see your partner's answers. Some of the answers blow me away, they're so dead on. Some are good because they are able to name the celebrity that was on the tip of my fingers, but I just couldn't type fast enough, so I settled for "star" or "actress" or ashamedly "man". Those are the good partners and the ones who I wish I could chat with afterward. When you get 1,000+ points with a partner you feel like you are in the zone. But alas, you work together for two minutes and it's over.
Then there are the other ones. The ones who don't/can't type. I have resorted to taunting them in my answers. I'm sure that there will be a name for this anonymous taunting soon, but I'm not clever enough to come up with it. In a recent attempt, the picture was a cat. It was a fluffy white cat on a black background. I knew that "cat" would be many more points than either black or white, so the only thing I typed in was "cat" and "fluffy". You can see when your partner enters a term, but, obviously, you can't see what they typed. Thirty seconds go by and they have only entered two search terms. Knowing that they will be able to see what I type at the end of the game, I start entering taunts into the search item. I type "type c-a-t". "It is a cat". "You know, cat". "My 3yo can spell cat". That round I only received 80 points, but I did feel better afterward.
One suggestion would be a "continue with this partner" button where if you are in the zone, you can keep going. You hit a few people who can't type "c-a-t" and you long for the ones where you both enter "anime" within one second. To everyone who tries, have fun with it, type quickly and keep your responses as specific as possible.
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Then there are the other ones. The ones who don't/can't type. I have resorted to taunting them in my answers. I'm sure that there will be a name for this anonymous taunting soon
Pathetic?
Yes, exactly.
Allowing any pair of users to have more than a single session together would defeat many of the "protections" in this system, allow people to collaborate to generate inaccurate labels.
Damm your fRuanfalder! i no hoo u R noww!
Good thing I watch so much Yank TV. You get much higher scores if you use American names for everything. I had to call a 'dummy' a 'pacifier', and use 'soccer' when I meant 'football'.
Looks like Google ripped off the idea from Carnegie-Mellon's attempts to help the blind use the web. http://www.espgame.org/
I'm sure that there will be a name for this anonymous taunting soon, but I'm not clever enough to come up with it.
Anonytaunt
a·non·y·taunt [uh-non-uh-tawnt]
There was an article in Wired about something similar.
For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/ff_humancomp
Damn you, Frauenfelder! As if I didn't waste enough time here already, here's another internet time suck that I can't seem to tear away from. High score so far: 1540; made it to #54 for today's scores.
I immediately started anonytaunting. Gawd.
A couple times things ended up being inaccurate--some dunce didn't know what a table of contents was, so I said index and, lo and behold, so had they.
Great. I've just been told I suck because some idiot doesn't know what Jennifer Lopez looks like.
I did that for awhile earlier this year, but I got tired of all the people who can't spell but still insist on participating.
#6 Elisa, you can hardly say they're ripping CM off. They did a tech talk at Google to pitch the idea: watch the video.
#12 She's a girl, right?
My last partner labeled a Turkey map as "china" and "russia", probably 'cause there were a litle Turkey flag on the top, wich is red. *This* is a sucker.
I think this is neat, and totally got sucked in.
I think it's worth mentioning, though, that while playing, I saw quite a few pictures of naked breasts (titillating!) and one picture of an aborted fetus that wish I very much wish I could unsee.
This is great - but I hate teaming up with someone who can name everybody.
As #6 pointed out, this addictive game existed for years here: www.espgames.org
And here is a presentation from its author where he speaks about the purpose of that "game" and Human Computing in general, very interesting : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
Ill one afternoon last autumn, I got hooked on the game, watched Dr Luis von Ahn discussing it a few times, drifting in and out of sleep (me, not the doctor), wrote a short explanation for the general reader at the BBC site, drifted back to sleep - and only got round to playing Peekaboom later. Dr von Ahn talks about Peekaboom in the various videos, and it takes this kind of game to a much more intense experience - longer, more focussed and, if anything, more addictive!
Hmmm, is this Google's ingenious way of getting free mechanical turks to accurately label the images on the web?
You could stick a leaderboard on any task and netizens would be compelled to use it.
I like this better than Mechanical Turk, the fast pace makes you type whatever comes to mind first, which I think makes the answers closer to what you would want when you are doing an image search.
Regardless, I've already spent hours, literally, doing this.
Thank you for destroying whatever productivity I might have had this afternoon.