Week 11- 11/1 and 11/3

This week in Dissecting the Internet we studied crowd sourcing by playing games. On tuesday, we watched a TED talk and clips from another show about Luis van Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, who uses crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is using millions of people to solve large scale problems. For example, he created CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHAs which are security tests to make sure that the response is by a human, but they also dual function as a way to help digitize books. Instead of wasting 10 seconds on typing a random code, people are now also being productive because they are helping solve a problem that the computer can't solve and that would take a few people hundreds of years to do. Luis van Ahn also created the ESP game which a fun game that also helps to label Google images. His newest project is called Duolingo which is a free site that teaches the user a language and also helps to translate the web into different languages. For thursday, we had to come up with our own crowdsourcing game that we would be able to play in class without a computer. My group came up with the idea of doing a human knot where everyone had to help to get the knot untangled and back in a circle. The other games were a lot of fun to play as well. In all the games, we had to use everyone's help to solve a problem.