Benjamin Good

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SOLVEA Game of Life,for Scientists, by
Scientists

• Benjamin Good
• Bioinformatics Moderator, Scientist Solutions

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Why SOLVE?

• Games are Fun
• Attract scientists to the site
• Keep them on the site
• A game like SOLVE
• Can teach science
• Can learn science

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Games are good
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A new opportunity

• What if all of the energy expended on games could
  be harnessed and applied?

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Human Computation

• Getting lots of people to solve problems that are
  difficult for computers.
• (term introduced by Luis Von Ahn, CMU)

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Difficult Problem 1

• Assigning labels to (lots of) images

Gorilla
Frog
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A new kind of game
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ESP Game Results (4 months in 2003)

• 13,630 players added 1,271,451 labels to 293,760
  images
• Given about 5,000 players online continuously,
  could label all of the images in Google in a
  month
• At almost zero cost
• http//images.google.com/imagelabeler/

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More difficult problems
Amphibian
Gorilla
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SOLVE

• Solving the
• Ontology
• Learning problem
• Very
• Efficiently

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SOLVE

• Several versions
• Trivial pursuit for life scientists.
• Is it true that histiocytes are kinds of
  macrophages?
• ESP-science
• Extended ESP

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Key the SOLVE feedback loop
Questions with known answers used to train and
evaluate players
Questions without answers get answered!
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Preliminary data

• 2 brief experiments have shown that scientists
  like it.
• It has enzyme! Whooo I like it!
• "It's amusing me
• "Woo! Atherosclerosis is in there now!
• This a helluva lot more interesting than those
  talks were

Fast, cheap and out of control a zero curation
model for ontology development. (Good et al 2006)
pmid 17094234
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Conclusions

• A game area for the S.S. site would generate
  interest and excitement.
• A game like SOLVE would advance science by
  putting the idle minds of brilliant people to
  work.

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Thanks!

• Marcia and the S.S. team!
• Rusty for inviting me to join S.S.
• My advisor Mark Wilkinson.

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References

• See my Connotea references under applied games
• http//tinyurl.com/yltk4d
• http//www.connotea.org/user/bgood/tag/applied20g
  ames