Communications of the ACM
Hive-Mind Solves Tasks Using Google Glass Ant Game
A new game connects wearers of Google Glass to a virtual ant colony, where they solve real-world problems.
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Researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University have developed Swarm!, a game that connects Google Glass wearers to a virtual ant colony and asks them to solve real-world problems that stump traditional crowdsourcing efforts.
Swarm players leave virtual trails on a map, which behave like ant trails, fading away with time unless reinforced by other users traveling the same route. The players seek out virtual resources to benefit their colony, such as food, and must avoid crossing the trails of other colony members.
To gain further resources for their colony, players can carry out real-world tasks. For example, if the developers wanted to create a map of the locations of every power outlet in an airport, they could reward players with virtual food for every photo of a socket they took. The photos and location data recorded by the system could then be used to generate a map that anyone could use.
Carnegie Mellon University professor Niki Kittur says projects such as Swarm! could help solve physical world problems because they can tap into what a person is seeing.
From New Scientist
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