ESP Game.

Publicated on : 1216244965
Apparently this is a online game, but a weird one at it. Taken form their website it says:



When you play a game at Gwap, you aren't just having fun. You're helping the world become a better place. By playing our games, you're training computers to solve problems for humans all over the world. Let's take the ESP Game for example. You and a partner see the same image and are asked to type in a tag for it. When you agree on a tag, you move on and are awarded points. After just a minute of play, you've agreed on six or seven tags.



Wikipedia says about the rules:



Once logged in, a user is automatically matched with a random partner. The partners do not know each others identity and they cannot communicate. Once matched, they will both be shown the same image. Their task is to agree on a word that would be an appropriate label for the image. They both enter possible words, and once a word is entered by both partners (not necessarily at the same time), that word is agreed upon, and that word becomes a label for the image.



Once they agree on a word, they are shown another image. They have two and a half minutes to label 15 images. Both partners have the option to pass; that is, give up on an image. Once one partner passes, the other partner is shown a message that their partner wishes to pass. Both partners must pass for a new image to be shown. Some images have "taboo" words; that is, words that cannot be entered as possible labels. This is done automatically by the system: once an image has been labeled enough times with the same word, that word becomes taboo so that the image will get a variety of different words as labels.



This is clever. Unless I am missing something, but can't you massivly crack image CAPTCHA's with this game? It looks just like the Google image labeler[2] in some sense. I hope spammers won't build something like this because it's way too clever. On the other hand who has faith in CAPTCHA'S these days, they are officially dead.



[1] http://www.gwap.com/gwap/gamesPreview/espgame/

[2] http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/