GWAP Blog

Server Maintenance

noreply@blogger.com (Luis von Ahn) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:29:00 +0000

GWAP will be down from April 16 to April 22 for server maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update: Due to Easter break, the maintenance window will end on April 25.

Update #2: Things are taking us a little longer than we thought. More soon.

Update #3: We will be bringing the servers back up today, but some services may still not work.

Your Games and our Algorithms

noreply@blogger.com (Luis von Ahn) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:15:00 +0000

We haven't added many updates to the blog, but have been busy
with several things behind the scenes. Over the past year we have been
able to put your games to good use towards improving the state of computer science: check out some of the things we've done here and here.

Thank you for playing, we hope that you enjoy the games as much as we
love playing with the data!

Global Chat and Comments

noreply@blogger.com (Luis von Ahn) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:46:00 +0000

We're happy to announce the release of a global chat room on GWAP.com. We hope you enjoy it as much as we are!

For now, we won't let players chat while they're playing a game, but you can chat before and after each game. On the right of the chat window you'll see a list of the people who are currently viewing the conversation.

If for some reason you'd rather only play the games and not chat, you can always minimize the window to log out of chat. GWAP.com will remember this, and next time you come to the site the window will be automatically minimized.

Also, we now allow you to leave comments on our news stories. We want to hear from you!

Finding Beautiful Images with Matchin

noreply@blogger.com (Luis von Ahn) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:20:00 +0000

We've begun analyzing the data from Matchin and the results are beautiful (literally!). Matchin asks two randomly chosen players "which of these two images do you think your partner prefers?" It's possible to combine the ratings of many players in order to determine which images are best overall. See for yourself:

Also, we thought it would be interesting to see which ones are preferred by females:

And which ones are preferred by males:

GWAP Can Guess Your Gender

noreply@blogger.com (Luis von Ahn) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:18:00 +0000

You pick between 10 pairs of images and GWAP can tell if you're male or female! How does it work? Magic (and a bit of machine learning).

Try it here!

GWAP on Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Luis von Ahn) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:13:00 +0000

We've been quiet for a few months in terms of announcements, but we've been working hard to improve gwap.com! Today, we are pleased to announce the GWAP Facebook application, which you can add here

You can now play all our games on Facebook, and also compare your points with your friends! So, add the application and get your friends playing.

Hello World

noreply@blogger.com (Luis von Ahn) — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:25:00 +0000

Sixteen months, 103,417 lines of code, 154 meetings, 1,034 cans of Mountain Dew, and GWAP.com is finally here!

The Name. Yes, GWAP is a little weird as a name. Partly because we're a little weird ourselves, and partly because it's impossible to get a decent domain name. GWAP stands for "Games With A Purpose", a phrase coined by Lenore Blum to describe the types of games found on this site.

The Purpose. The games on this site all have a common purpose: to make computers more intelligent. As you play the games, you are teaching computers things that they don't know yet. Please help them learn!

The Team. The person who made this site possible is our chief engineer, Mike Crawford. He agreed to move from Australia to Pittsburgh to work on this project -- ha! In addition, Michael Brotzman, Severin Hacker (yes, his last name really is Hacker), Edith Law, Bryant Lee, and Edison Tan all spent countless hours architecting the games and the site. Ryan Staake was our ninja graphic designer.

The Past. GWAP.com is brought to you by the same people who created The ESP Game (a.k.a., the Google Image Labeler), Peekaboom and reCAPTCHA.

Check out our video!

Enjoy!

Luis von Ahn
Executive Producer