We've begun analyzing the data from Matchin and the results are beautiful (literally!). Matchin asks two randomly chosen players "which of these two images do you think your partner prefers?" It's possible to combine the ratings of many players in order to determine which images are best overall. See for yourself:



Also, we thought it would be interesting to see which ones are preferred by females:



And which ones are preferred by males:

You pick between 10 pairs of images and GWAP can tell if you're male or female! How does it work? Magic (and a bit of machine learning).

Try it here!

We've been quiet for a few months in terms of announcements, but we've been working hard to improve gwap.com! Today, we are pleased to announce the GWAP Facebook application, which you can add here.

You can now play all our games on Facebook, and also compare your points with your friends! So, add the application and get your friends playing.

...have been insane. Quickly after launch, articles from the media started popping up: The BBC, MSNBC, Slashdot, The Associated Press, New Scientist, The Register, O'Reilly Radar, etc. Over 20,000 people have already joined and are playing on GWAP.com.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be rolling out many new features in the site, including rewards for scoring high in the games.

Join the revolution!!!

Sixteen months, 103,417 lines of code, 154 meetings, 1,034 cans of Mountain Dew, and GWAP.com is finally here!

The Name. Yes, GWAP is a little weird as a name. Partly because we're a little weird ourselves, and partly because it's impossible to get a decent domain name. GWAP stands for "Games With A Purpose", a phrase coined by Lenore Blum to describe the types of games found on this site.

The Purpose. The games on this site all have a common purpose: to make computers more intelligent. As you play the games, you are teaching computers things that they don't know yet. Please help them learn!

The Team. The person who made this site possible is our chief engineer, Mike Crawford. He agreed to move from Australia to Pittsburgh to work on this project -- ha! In addition, Michael Brotzman, Severin Hacker (yes, his last name really is Hacker), Edith Law, Bryant Lee, and Edison Tan all spent countless hours architecting the games and the site. Ryan Staake was our ninja graphic designer.

The Past. GWAP.com is brought to you by the same people who created The ESP Game (a.k.a., the Google Image Labeler), Peekaboom and reCAPTCHA.

Check out our video!



Enjoy!

Luis von Ahn
Executive Producer