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[So Many Schemes: Musings on Technology and Entrepreneurship] Human Computation April 11th, 2006 A few days ago I attended a talk by Luis von Ahn from CMU. Luis von Ahn is one of the creators of the ESP Game and Peekaboom, both interactive, multiplayer online games that harness human computing power while also being entertaining. These games get people to help label images, generating data that will ultimately be used to make better image search engines and better computer vision image analysis and segmentation algorithms. Basically, Amazon Mechanical Turk got it wrong: fun is a better motivation than money. Luis von Ahn opened his talk by saying that people spend many millions of human hours on solitaire each year, and that it would be useful if even a small fraction of that time could be harnessed to get people to play games that are also useful. If this is his goal, he has succeeded ”” some people spend over 40 hours a week on the ESP Game, which has been very successful. Luis also presented a general approach for turning computationally hard...