Play tag at Artigo

How it works

Artigo is another site that, like Labelme, Peekaboo, and steve.museum, is geared toward using the collective intelligence of internet users to gather data that will improve image search functionality.  Artigo is most like steve.museum in being semantically oriented.  As at steve.museum, you provide your own tags for the image that is presented.  Artigo’s image database contains 15,000 images and is set up at the University of Munich.  But there are several refinements that make Artigo game-like, and arguably more effective in obtaining valid results.

Each game session is timed; the players have 5 minutes. The number of pictures reviewed is a function of how quickly the players agree to move on to the next one.  Generally you see 5-7 images per game.  There are TABOO words, ones that have already been associated with the image.  These appear below the image in RED.  Players must dig deeper to find appropriate tags.

The more taboo words there are for an image the more points you earn for the tags you provide.  Most importantly your tag is accepted only if you and your partner have both provided it, thus weeding out the chaff.

As you play a countdown of the seconds remaining appears at the top, and your points up to that point on the bottom right.  You can see how many words your partner has selected, they appear as BLUE dots on the left, but not what they are.  But when the game is over, each image is shown again with artist, title and date identified.

You also see the tags given by your partner and yourself, and any that agree are shown in  YELLOW.   They are the ones that you get credit for.  Of course you get your final score as well.

Artigo also offers a monetary inducement to play.    “Each month, the player with the highest score of the month will receive 50 euros!” says the site.  My level of play is way too low to ever win.  The highest scorer this month to date has 10,510 points.  I can only imagine a 24/7 game going on with numerous players.  The interface is simple, the explanation straightforward, the game interesting.

Background

The creators credit “Luis von Ahn whose ESP Game inspired us to create Artigo” and refer users to his talk on Human Computation, which is really interesting.  A paper relating to the work of von Ahn’s and his collaborators further elucidates the principles.  I should also note that Peekaboom is now called Sqigl, has a slightly different interface and is bundled with 4 other Human computation games, three of which are image related, at    I’ll have to get back there before reporting further.

Thoughts

One of the key benefits of these types of games is that they are so much fun that no financial inducement is necessary.  I wonder whether the Artigo monthly payout actually promotes greater use, and whether determining this is a part of the project.  Unfortunately Artigo doesn’t provide any information about how the project is going, about resulting papers, etc.  Nor do they even provide an email address to ask further questions.  This, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is frustrating.

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Tagged as: Collective intelligence, ESP Game, Image search, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Luis von Ahn