The human brain is the most powerful “computer” we know. Despite the fact that computers have been replacing humans in several activities there are still some fields where our “computational” power cannot be beaten. Humans can in seconds understand context with thousands of variable and a huge number of layers where computer would fry its circuits to understand it in a rudimentary way. While some engineers still struggle to create more and more complex algorithms – that try to emulate artificial intelligence – others have putted their money in humans with free time.
Born out of crowdsourcing – a way of out outsource a service to a huge number of third parties – the human based computations seems to be the solution to the “simplicity” of nowadays algorithms. This area of computational science believes that a lot human performing small – although complex for computer – tasks would create the most powerful computer ever built. There are several methods of human based computation like:
Let us take contextual market for example, while several companies (Google, Yahoo…) use complex algorithms to deliver marketing to content, boo-box developed a very elegant service that believes humans “rock” when it comes to contextualization. The first group works like a guy with machine gun trying to kill a rat in a dark room, the second like a sniper that shoot just once and delivers the right message to its target – bulls eye all the time!!! There are a few decades ahead before a computer understands what I am saying – even I don’t – until then I am gonna use boo-box. What about you?
