The future of HBC

There's a reason I've chosen 'in numbers lies strength' as the blog's subtitle, for it refers to a couple of things. First, the 'numbers' can mean people - because of the HBC, we all are a part of a world-wide computer. Then it can also mean the numerical data gathered from human-computer interaction. Last but not least, it's the endless possibilities we can bring to life.

Regarding the last part, I cannot foresee what the future will hold, but I predict that crowd-sourcing and human-based computation will bring many advancements to the civilization - hey, we use it already to everyone's advantage, and that's before we have absolute knowledge on how a human mind works like. Because the growth in the study is exponential, given enough time we'll unlock it sooner or later, possibly through the help of HBC. And because we're 'teaching' computers to think like humans, maybe we'll be able to finally create a fully autonomous artificial intelligence? :)

Human-based computation brings limitless possibilities. The more the merrier!

Phylo - a game with a purpose

Here we have something that brings out the fun part of HBC - a flash-based puzzle game, Phylo, developed by McGill Centre for Bioinformatics. This short video explains pretty much what the game is about and how does it help biology scientists:

Remember when I mentioned how the time spent playing Solitaire could be used in a more productive way? This is what I meant - this type of interaction is called a human-based computation game, or game with a purpose. Basically, by playing a video game, you generate data. The nucleotide sequences generated by Phylo are obtained from actual sequence data from the UCSC Genome Browser. Your score (the data) is then being compared with the current computer-generated one, and if you happen to score higher, your data is being re-introduced into the global alignment as optimization!

To me, the game looks sort of like Dr. Mario, which I have played extensively as a child. Unlike Dr. Mario, however, the data is real, and because quite a lot of diseases are caused by inefficiencies of the genetic make up - by contributing your score you could possibly (through a medium) help save real lives!

You can play Phylo here - think about it next time you boot up Solitaire. :)

reCAPTCHA - everyone writes a book

Unless you're an internet freshman, you have probably come in contact with a CAPTCHA - most likely to access some service on a website. And like me, you probably have refreshed some of them many times to generate one that's readable.

Why do we have to put up with CAPTCHA when it's so annoying? Well, as you might know, it was developed to combat the spread of automated software (bots). A CAPTCHA is a test to prove you're human - because only a human can read and interpret those scribbles.

So what exactly CAPTCHA does to be considered a human-based computation? Luis von Ahn (pictured), an early CAPTCHA developer and crowd-sourcing pioneer, has seen an opportunity to make the process useful. Enter reCAPTCHA - a system developed in Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. What makes it different? The 'scribbles' are in fact, a (distorted) scanned text - one that optical character recognition (OCR) software can't recognize. A human, however, is (usually) more perceptive, and the words that are rewritten are later turned into machine-interpretable information.

So! Next time you write a CAPTCHA, keep in mind that you're doing your part to bring a book into digital format. :)

A human computer

When we talk about computers today, we most likely mean electronic devices, such as desktop PCs or laptops. But there was a time when the term 'computer' was used to refer to humans and meant 'one who computes' - a person, or team of people, who would work on long and often tedious mathematical calculations. So a human being is - in a sense - a computer, because there are still tasks that a human mind can accomplish, but even cutting edge devices cannot.

Did you know that in 2003, 9 billion hours were spent on playing Solitaire? In comparison, it took only 7 million human hours (6.8 hours of Solitaire playing time in 2003) to build the Empire State Building, and only 20 million human hours (still less than a day of Solitaire) to build the Panama Canal! Now imagine if there was some way to harness all this playing time for doing something productive and perhaps fun.

That is the basis of human-based computation - a computer science technique in which certain steps of a computational function are being outsourced to humans to complete tasks in a symbiotic relation. In short, instead of a human employing a computer to solve a problem, the role is reversed - the computer asks people to solve a problem, then collects, interprets and develops a solution based on the answers.

Human-based computation, in my opinion, brings a lot of benefits to modern society - a fine example of it is Wikipedia, which I'll heavily reference because of that. Let's take a look at some other examples and draw conclusions, shall we? :)