A Very Cool Experiment in Human Computing
We’re seeing the reversal of a trend. In years past, machine intelligence has been touted as the solution to all of life’s problems. Now, we’re seeing a resurgence of human intelligence- not AI, but HI being used more and more for tasks normally delegated to computers. Amazon has attempted to leverage human intelligence with limited success through its Mechanical Turk, but the service never really took off. But now, a new crowdsourcing, human computing application is poised to capture our collective imagination and demonstrate the true potential of human-powered computing. It looks like this:
Galaxy Zoo uses the power of the crowds on the Internet to identify galaxies. They explain,
The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognising patterns than a computer can ever be. Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you.
And so far, thousands of people online, each contributing a few minutes, have identified more galaxies than any supercomputer. It’s the power of the masses- and I expect more and more applications taking advantage of it sprout up. Very cool.
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Your post inspired me to check out Galaxy Zoo. Within a couple of minutes I was identifying galaxies as elliptical, spiral, etc. I became bored after ~10 images and won’t be returning, but it was fun to try and see how the system worked. Looks like they’re running ASP.NET on a Baltimore, MD server to query a database of terabytes.
I am curious how their algorithm judges which contributions are correct and which are not. It would be interesting to know how many individuals view each image? Does the system use plurality (majority rule) or do those volunteers who tend to guess correctly carry more weight than those who do not? I am working on a similar algorithm (not in Astronomy) so might just contact them after I finish this comment.
Galaxy Zoo reminds me of Amazon’s contribution to the “Find Jim Gray” mission this past winter. In Jan/Feb, Mechanical Turk workers voluntarily scanned over half a million satellite images covering some 3,000 square miles of ocean. Evidently, the Turing Award winner capsized his sailboat and drowned before anyone could spot him–but what a remarkable search effort.
The parent project, SDSS, intends to “address fundamental questions about the nature of the Universe, the origin of galaxies and quasars, and the formation and evolution of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way.” According to their web site, in 5 years the SDSS has:
- imaged more than 8,000 square degrees of the sky in five bandpasses
- detected nearly 200 million celestial objects
- measured spectra of more than 675,000 galaxies, 90,000 quasars and 185,000 stars
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very interesting stuff
Interesting… Very, interesting.