A Few Ideas

Here are a couple of ideas I came up with over the weekend. While these may not be what we are looking for, perhaps they will spur new ideas for everyone else.

The first is a sort of foreign policy model that explores how people would choose to deal with other nations. The game would take place in an imaginary land (think Middle Earth) that is broken up into different regions/nations. The players wouldn't know this, but the different nations' policies in this land would be initially modeled after real policies of different countries. As play progresses, players can modify their nation's policies (perhaps we could find a way to average out the 'votes' for changes so the policies reflect the most popular change). In this way, the game defines itself as people play - eventually the nations of the land would no longer represent the original models at all. It could be used to examine how different foreign policies work and how others fail.

The next idea would be a tool used to teach computers (maybe). Since the human brain is so good at visual calculations and predictions, we could make a game where people predict where a moving object will be in 5 or 10 seconds in the future. The computer could store these movement scenarios as experiences, which could later be used in collision avoidance for vehicles. A computer in a car could identify the movement of different objects and refer to these experiences to predict where the object will be, hopefully helping to prevent collisions.

This next link is a game that is sort of the reverse of the ESP game. In this game, the player is presented a series of images and he must guess the search keyword that would return those images. It's a different spin on the same sort of game.
http://grant.robinson.name/projects/guess-the-google/

I was also looking up National Archive transcriptions, to try to find more information about whether it is even a relevant problem when I found this site. It is in the British National Archives website and it is a series of pages that lead you through a tutorial in how to transcribe old documents. This link leads to the 'Practice' page, but once on that page the links on the left are for the 'tutorial' sections. I thought it was interesting and just wanted to share it with everyone.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latinpalaeography/practice-documents.htm

Another idea I had touches on image recognition. People are good at identifying a representation of something as the thing itself (i.e. a stick figure is a person). We could make a game where people identify the object represented in the picture. This could be used to teach computers what rough drawings represent. Here's a link to a 'Similar Search' image search engine that allows you to draw what you want to search and it finds it (for example, try drawing a t-shirt and hit search). It's pretty amazing - I found this website last year when it was still in beta form. Looks like it's live now. It's fun to play with and it's pretty amazing all the stuff it can do!
http://www.gazopa.com/