Hide and Peek.

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Author: Jones, Karen

NOT ALL ONLINE GAMES ARE designed to boost intelligence, but there is an exception in Peekaboom (www .peekaboom.org), an entertaining mind exercise that 0may eventually help computers and robots recognize images and objects. Designed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Peekaboom is a two-player game where one contestant, called Boom, sends pieces of an image to a randomly assigned partner called Peek. Peek then attempts to identify as many images as he can, along with their names, in a 4-minute round. Partners change places with each round. Meanwhile, metadata is collected that cocreator Luis von Ahn hopes to apply to computer vision.

"Computers still have trouble with such basic tasks as reading distorted text or finding where an image is located," says von Ahn. The best approach, he says, is to "rely on machine learning." In this case, that means training an algorithm to recognize an object by showing it many images.

Players of Peekaboom help solve the problem of gathering data needed to achieve this, says von Ahn, simply by playing. Applications for computer vision include much more accurate online image searches and enhanced robotics. "Robots need to see," says von Ahn. "So far they have cameras, but they can't recognize objects." The next step is to change that.

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By Karen Jones