Cycle stealing

Two of the many peculiar issues that I learnt after coming here to U of M are cycle stealing and cycle stealing.


The trivial of which is what strikes first. Many students park their cycles (bikes) either in the department or home for a few hours just to find either the entire cycle or part of it missing. It is one of the most irritating crimes prevalent in this otherwise safe city. Needless to say, the cost of the lock is 20% of these pollution free transport which are generally priced between 50 and 1000 dollars. Roller blades and skates are common here too..

The more relevant of the two - about which I really wanted to write - is however something that is of potential use to the society unlike the other. A variety of this called the Human Cycle Stealing was the topic of the lecture that I recently attended. A Ph.D. student from Carnegie Mellon University had come here to present the idea of Intelligently using human cycles to deal intractable problems in the field of computer science

Almost everyone of you reading this would have created a mail account some time in the recent past and would have come across a text box where you had to type something that is written in a picture. This is called a CAPTCHA. A very simple and effective tool used to establish that SOMEONE is creating an account and not SOMETHING. No computer software could read what is written on that picture and therefore cannot be used to automatically create email accounts.

Have I eariler told you people about this ESPGame ? Something that I was playing for hours together not really knowing what was happening behind it. The game is the brain child of the same guy who came for the lecture. Two entirely random people wanting to play the game see a series of pictures one at a time. They go to the next picture only if they both could type one word in common about the image. You obviously don't get to see who the other person is, what he/she types, how many words they have typed and stuff like that. Eventhough I played this game entirely to demonstrate my typing prowess and capability to match my ideas with someone across the globe, I realised that there is much more I was doing for the society by playing this game.
Indirectly and cleverly, the makers of the game have used me and millions of other naive counterparts to label around 4 million pictures in the web. These labels ease the task of picture search and also can be used as an effective content filter.

This and many other applcations of effectively stealing the human cycles to solve the otherwise intractable problems in computer science, according to Luis von Ahn, seems to be a more justifiable story line of Matrix as against the current existing Matrix-theory of utilising humans for the power generated through their brains.

The lecture was technical and yet evinced simplicity. A unique combination in the field of engineering.