Games With a Purpose
I have a new person that I am extremely impressed with. His name is Luis von Ahn. I’m pretty sure Bobby tried to turn me on to some of his ideas a few years ago but I didn’t really pay much attention. Then I was watching some old 90s documentary called Spin and I saw Luis von Ahn’s video featured on the right. I took a look and was blown away. Not only is he a super-genius and gives me the impression that he’s thinking in different hemispheres. He’s also really funny. If my old comp sci teachers had been anything like this guy, I probably wouldn’t be a degenerate poker payer today.
Auf jeden Fall, it starts out a little slow as he explains what captchas are, but then it starts getting pretty interesting when he explains his concepts of Human Computation and “Games With a Purpose“. This guy Luis von Ahn is thinking a lot of moves ahead. If you are at all interested in hearing a lecture on those subjects by a teacher that students pay Carnegie Mellon University $45k/yr in tuition to learn from, check out the following video. And if you are seriously interested in this stuff, I’d recommend going to buy this book here called Interactive Computation: The New Paradigm
I’ve long been saying that a rake-free poker site is inevitable because of the potential vertical conversions you can make from your poker player base aside from just raking their money off. People have always assumed that I mean advertising, but there are other subtle ways to make money off your web traffic. The point that I think people are missing is that time in and of itself is a valuable commodity… maybe the most valuable. If you have hundreds of thousands of people playing poker, that translates into a lot of man-hours. And man-hours can be used.
The whole “games with a purpose” model can be applied to poker and I’ve been brainstorming the best ways for the last week or so. Maybe I’ll give more details as I wrap my head around it.