ESP game

The ESP game (<a href="/facts/Extrasensory_perception/nT29VWIA">extrasensory perception</a> game) is a <a href="/facts/Human-based_computation_game/Pwq0Ierq">human-based computation game</a> developed to address the problem of creating difficult <a href="/facts/Metadata/qt35z79C">metadata</a>. The idea behind the game is to use the <a href="/facts/Human_computation/1F9whbVB">computational power of humans</a> to perform a task that <a href="/facts/Computer/SQe1aK05">computers</a> cannot (originally, <a href="/facts/Image_recognition/Tl2Yyk66">image recognition</a>) by packaging the task as a <a href="/facts/Video_game/vmTdNASJ">game</a>. It was originally conceived by <a href="/facts/Luis_von_Ahn/hbVWrNb5">Luis von Ahn</a> of <a href="/facts/Carnegie_Mellon_University/XKd7L2KA">Carnegie Mellon University</a> and first posted online in 2003. 
On the official website, there was a running count of "Labels collected since October 5, 2003", updated every 12 hours. They stated that "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!" 36 million labels had been collected as of May 2008. The original paper (2004) reported that a pair of players can produce 3.89 ± 0.69 labels per minute. At this rate, 5,000 people continuously playing the game could provide one label per image indexed by Google (425 million) in 31 days.
In late 2008, the game was rebranded as <a href="/facts/GWAP/Pwq0Ierq">GWAP</a> ("game with a purpose"), with a new user interface. Some other games that were also created by Luis von Ahn, such as "Peekaboom" and "<a href="/facts/Phetch/eRLYPPf1">Phetch</a>", were discontinued at that point. "Peekaboom" extends the ESP game by asking players to select the region of the image that corresponds to the label. "Squigl" asks players to trace the object outline in an image. "Matchin" asks players to pick the more beautiful out of two images. "Verbosity", which collects common-sense facts from players.
<a href="/facts/Google/GT9Sugza">Google</a> bought a license to create its own version of the game (<a href="/facts/Google_Image_Labeler/QUhnYHyM">Google Image Labeler</a>) in 2006 in order to return better search results for its online images. The license of the data acquired by Ahn's ESP game, or the Google version, is not clear. Google's version was shut down on September 16, 2011, as part of the Google Labs closure in September 2011.
Most of the ESP dataset is not publicly available. It was reported in the <a href="/facts/ImageNet/DPaK4GLC">ImageNet</a> paper that as of 2008, only 60K images and their labels can be accessed.

ESP game open-in-new

ESP game