TR-IIS-08-007    Fulltext

Abstract

“Human Computation” represents a new paradigm of applications that take advantage of people’s desire to be entertained and produce useful metadata as a by-product. By creating games with a purpose, human computation has shown promise in solving a variety of problems that computer computation cannot currently resolve completely. Using the ESP game as an example, we propose an evaluation metric, called system gain, for human computation systems, and also study the properties of the ESP game using analysis. We argue that human computation systems should be played with a strategy. An Optimal Puzzle Selection Strategy (OPSA) is then implemented based on our analysis to improve 1 human computation. Using a comprehensive set of simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed OPSA approach can effectively improve the system gain performance of the ESP game, as long as the number of puzzles in the system is sufficiently large.