ce n'est pas une advertisment

Mycroft is an interesting experiment in mobilizing the distributed brainpower of web surfers to do useful work in microchunks. In its current incarnation, it looks a lot like a banner ad network, except that you interact with it on the hosting site. For example:

The idea is that people who contribute by solving these little puzzles will get incentive prizes, hosting sites will get a cash bounty, and people with large, tedious parallelizable workloads that need human processing, will pay to get the collective eyes of the web on their problems. It seems like a pretty good idea, I hope it can succeed.

I do wonder how Mycroft will ensure high quality and accuracy; presumably they will have some statistical (and linguistic?) models for sorting out distributions of answers from a sufficiently large set of responses. And I hope they are planning to try some different graphical formats, as the current banners look so much like ads and would seem too easy to ignore.

[via Future Now]