By Mark O’Neill
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have introduced a website with games designed to make peoples computers get better at doing certain tasks.
It’s one of those “for the common good” things, where you play the games and the researchers collect the results together and then use them to improve existing applications for everyone.
To give you an example, one of them is a game where you are shown a picture and you have to give words to describe that picture – you may know it better as Google Image Labeler. So these aren’t silly little league games. Some big money is involved here!
There’s only five games at the moment but I’m sure more will be added in the future. If anyone criticises you for playing the games, just tell them you’re “doing your bit to improve the internet”.