Crowd computing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:31, 30 July 2016

Revision as of 16:30, 22 August 2016

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==History==

In the late 1800s, a team of British archeologists in Egypt stumbled upon a half million pieces of 2000-year-old papyrus, each with remarkably well-preserved text requiring translation. The pieces were shipped from the desert to Oxford University, where generations of scholars have been working to decipher their writings ever since. After over a hundred years, only about 15 percent of the collection had been completed. These manuscripts contain remarkably significant pieces of history, including the controversial Gospel of Thomas and the lost comedies of Athenian playwright Menander. In 2011, however, the scholars decided to speed up the process by leveraging the crowdcloud. They launched a website, Ancient Lives, with a game that tasks members to translate small bits of the text from home. As of November 2011, users had already provided 4 million transcriptions, helping to identify Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plutarch’s “On the Cleverness of Animals” and much more.<ref>Crowdcomputing.com; http://www.crowdcomputing.com/uses-and-examples-of-crowd-computing</ref>

Another early example includes when, at the end of the 18th century, the British Royal Astronomers distributed spreadsheets by mail, asking the crowd to help them create maps of the stars and the seas. It reached its height in the United States during the 1930s, when the government employed hundreds of “human computers” to work on the WPA and the Manhattan Project. The word “computer,” as it applies to our modern-day devices, came directly from these mathematically minded men and women.<ref>Popper, Ben (17 April 2012). "Crowd computing taps artificial intelligence to revolutionize the power of our collective brains". Venture Beat. Retrieved 8 June 2012</ref>