when i wrote this post i was on my way back from berlin in a Dash8-300 plane, which is one of those cigars featuring two propellers which make you feel like in a 60ties movie. I started reading the make: magazin and read Tim O’Reilly’s article “Games with a purbose” for the second time. It is a great article pointing out a tech talk at google from professor Luis von Ahn.

“In his talk, von Ahn pointed out that in 2003, about 9 billion human.hours were spent playing solitaire. By contrast, only 7 million human-hours were spent building the Empire State Building, and only 20 million human.hours on the Panama Canal. ….. Von Ahn waggishly pointed out that harnessing humans to play games, especially games that solve computer problems that Ai cannot yet solve, would have been a far more plausible pretext for the AI of the Matrix to keep humans around. In fact, he’s committed to just that goal, saying:” We’re going to consider all humanity as am extremely advanced and large-scale distribute processing unit that can solve large scale problems that computers cannot yet solve”

Most of our current projects are in need of recommendation and personalization algorithms. We are using different techniques but some of them are trying to be really clever. E.g. there is one project which is based on wordnet, which i would describe as a database of semantic relations. This database is extreme useful when analyzing texts and trying to find out what they are really about. I think the problem with wordnet is that it is to straight and the bionic aspect is not harnessed at all. Benjamin, you know i wrote this for you, maybe you can make some clever comments here ;-)