CrowdSourcing
Crowdsourcing is a term that I wasn’t very familiar with before I researched it today. I used to think crowdsourcing as a way to give out a task to a certain crowd of people to complete it in exchange for some benefits for them. I haven’t gone deeply about the term before but I was aware of some crowdsourcing strategies used by companies to gather different data for their new products. For example, some advertising companies collect data for the user experiences and decide on the popularity or reliability of that approach. And after my research on this topic, I came to the conclusion that crowdsourcing is outsourcing the product or any specific function through a channel that is able to reach out to the big groups of people to be effective, where the most effective choice for the channel to outsource nowadays is the internet.
Recently I tried one of the technologies called ‘foldit’, a game of protein folding. After I downloaded the computer app, I got a clear vision about its great design so that all users with any background could understand what sort of tasks they are supposed to contribute. Even though I didn’t have prior knowledge about the proteins and their shapes, I still found that the idea of the game was interesting and fun to play. At first a few levels, the tasks were fairly straight forward as majority games have. But, when we proceed into further more levels, the difficulty level of the game will increase and one will see some complex shaped proteins. So basically I folded the proteins in different shapes and there was a certain point to be achieved to go to the next level and so on.
The one and only thing that came in my mind after spending time in the game was what exactly I was contributing. It was questionable to say that why the task can’t be performed by computer AI accurately at a reasonable cost of time and why humans were picked for the contribution of the folding of proteins. It’s not surprising but the game itself was fun and engaging to play with different levels of challenges piling up throughout. It is understandable that making all levels very straightforward and easy will make someone feel bored and on the other side making very difficult will make it difficult to understand and hence quit the task. This was able to give a fair amount of difficulty for the task completion and hence make the time engage in the game worth it.
I was surprised that the task the groups of people will do to this game is actually going to contribute to cure some diseases. Also, the data that was being collected from us was actually teaching the human strategies of folding proteins to the computers AT to get faster and reliable results. One piece of advice that I will suggest is to have the information on the usability of the function or product described in a clear manner so that the user will have clear sense of why exactly they are doing the task with a sacrifice of their time and energy.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
Alan J. Perlis
Welcome 