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        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> Building a general purpose 'human computer'
        
(Message started by: amichail on Jun 4^th, 2007, 11:28am)

Title: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 4^th, 2007, 11:28am

This is a computer that anyone can program.

Functions are written using high-level English. Each such function along with the input can be viewed as a two-player game.

As with the ESP Game, when two players agree on the output, they would then move on to the next function (possibly from a different program).

Issues include quality control, debugging, profiling, and refactoring your program into parts that are easy enough to be games.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by towr on Jun 4^th, 2007, 12:10pm

It isn't entirely clear to me what you mean.
Are the participants the computer, and are we giving them instructions in "high-level english"? Like with Recaptchas and the ESP game?

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 4^th, 2007, 12:14pm

on 06/04/07 at 12:10:47, towr wrote:

It isn't entirely clear to me what you mean.
Are the participants the computer, and are we giving them instructions in "high-level english"? Like with Recaptchas and the ESP game?

Yes, the computer consists of lots of people playing games. Each game corresponds to a function written in high-level English.

As with the ESP Game, players can pass if they are presented with something that is difficult.

And "programmers" get feedback on what parts of their program caused problems. They can try rewriting those parts.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by towr on Jun 4^th, 2007, 12:23pm

Is there any particular incentive for the cogs of the machine to turn?
For the ESP game, there is some measure of fun; but that will be difficult when you have more random assignments.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 4^th, 2007, 12:25pm

on 06/04/07 at 12:23:15, towr wrote:

Is there any particular incentive for the cogs of the machine to turn?
For the ESP game, there is some measure of fun; but that will be difficult when you have more random assignments.

That's part of the attraction: the variety of things to do. It's like having thousands of different games all in one place.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by towr on Jun 4^th, 2007, 12:55pm

on 06/04/07 at 12:25:53, amichail wrote:

That's part of the attraction: the variety of things to do. It's like having thousands of different games all in one place.

Thousands of very likely very boring games..
At least at Amazon's mechanical turk you can get paid..

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 4^th, 2007, 2:00pm

on 06/04/07 at 12:55:29, towr wrote:

Thousands of very likely very boring games..
At least at Amazon's mechanical turk you can get paid..

Another motivation for playing these games is to learn what sorts of things would work for writing programs using this service.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 4^th, 2007, 2:16pm

Also, you could identify more difficult games and randomly assign those to more skilled players.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by towr on Jun 4^th, 2007, 2:22pm

on 06/04/07 at 14:00:52, amichail wrote:

Another motivation for playing these games is to learn what sorts of things would work for writing programs using this service.

That would only be interesting for the small group of people that want to make such programs. You need a very large userbase besides that to make it work.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 4^th, 2007, 2:44pm

on 06/04/07 at 14:22:45, towr wrote:

That would only be interesting for the small group of people that want to make such programs. You need a very large userbase besides that to make it work.

While not many people would be interested in programming at a low-level using conventional computer languages, I think quite a lot of people would be interested in programming using high-level English. It's basically telling other people what to do -- who would not want to do that?

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by BNC on Jun 4^th, 2007, 10:56pm

on 06/04/07 at 14:44:20, amichail wrote:

But how many would want to be told by others what to do?

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by towr on Jun 5^th, 2007, 1:15am

It just wouldn't work if you don't have significantly more people running the programs than making them. If for every instruction in the pool two get added, nothing will get done.
And just consider how many instruction would be in any sort of usefull program. The ESP game already needs thousands and thousands of participants to get any usefull results, and that's just one "program".

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 5^th, 2007, 6:39am

Other incentives:

* educating the public so that they would have some idea of what computation is all about (e.g., make this a mandatory part of their education)

* playing these games well allows you to move up the rankings so that you would get more skilled people to play your games

* playing these games is part of a collaborative filtering algorithm for matching more suitable players to your programs

Maybe you can think of better incentives.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by rmsgrey on Jun 5^th, 2007, 10:53am

on 06/05/07 at 06:39:07, amichail wrote:

Other incentives:

* educating the public so that they would have some idea of what computation is all about (e.g., make this a mandatory part of their education)

This needs you to come up with some way of convincing educators to make room in their curriculum - probably at a state or national level in order to get enough participants.

Quote:

* playing these games well allows you to move up the rankings so that you would get more skilled people to play your games

This is only an incentive to programmers - you still need a proportion of drones.

Quote:

* playing these games is part of a collaborative filtering algorithm for matching more suitable players to your programs

Again, only even remotely relevant to programmers

Quote:

Maybe you can think of better incentives.

Maybe if I had a better understanding of the proposal, I might come up with something, but in general, the best incentive is to make the activity itself "fun".

The biggest weakness in the concept at present seems to be that you need the active programmers to be vastly outnumbered by the other participants - in terms of the man-hours put in, if nothing else - otherwise, it would be simpler for the programmers to perform their own tasks directly without the overhead...

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 5^th, 2007, 12:02pm

Another incentive: only those who score highly on these games can have their own programs executed by others.

This approach can create a situation where the number of programmers is vastly outnumbered by the number of players.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by towr on Jun 5^th, 2007, 12:27pm

That would also deter new people from starting, because there is no way they could get a high enough score.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by amichail on Jun 5^th, 2007, 12:30pm

on 06/05/07 at 12:27:26, towr wrote:

That would also deter new people from starting, because there is no way they could get a high enough score.

You can try variations on this idea such as the most points accumulated in the last week, etc.

You could also make it a bit random, so that higher scores increase the probability of winning. But you can win even with a low score.

Title: Re: Building a general purpose 'human computer'
Post by Grimbal on Jun 6^th, 2007, 2:59am

A few thoughts.

Something related is implemented by experts-exchange.com. It is a platform where people can ask questions and experts answer them. By answering questions, you can earn points to get the right to ask questions. Or you can pay to ask questions.

Another example is a project started to check whether Microsoft's FreeCell game is always solvable. Each game is generated by an integer, there are about 32000 different games. A call was made for volunteers to receive game numbers to try and report which one they solved.
See the article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCell#The_Internet_FreeCell_Project

And somehow, the stock market looks like a large number of humans brains connected in order to figure out the value of things. And that makes me think that after all, there have been human parallel computers before the computer exsted. Think of the accounting department of large companies 50 years ago, where some people's job was just to do the computations of balances, indexes, ratios, etc..