On your mark, get set, INDEX!

I wrote last March about competitive indexing in the form of a game called Fastr, in which you try to guess the tag (subject) that's been assigned to a photo on Flickr, a photo sharing service. Well, now some folks at Carnegie Mellon University have developed something similar, but with several big differences. On The ESP Game, you are randomly paired with another player whose identity you don't know. As each image comes up, the goal is to guess the same tag as your partner. You have two and a half minutes to agree on 15 images. The cool part about this is that players are actually helping label images, which means images will eventually be easier to search for. As I post, 18,340,292 images have been labeled since October 5, 2003.

"Computer programs can't yet determine the contents of arbitrary images, but the ESP game provides a novel method of labeling them: players get to have fun as they help us determine their contents. If the ESP game is played as much as other popular online games, we estimate that all the images on the Web can be labeled in a matter of weeks!"

Actually, I'm thinking they were a little optimistic about that last bit... Thanks for telling me about this game, Robert!