MMOs for Science : harnessing massively multiplayer gameplay to speed scientific research

Abstract

Many endeavours in scientific research require substantial amounts of human processing on enormous sets of data. Examples of such processing include an- notating images to indicate where anomalies are present (e.g., finding stars in an image of the night sky) or classifying images into one of several categories (e.g., to identify which proteins are present in an image of a cell). Performing such tasks computationally is very difficult, but non-experts can learn to do so proficiently with only minimal, example-based training. This project aims to leverage the human computing power of players in EVE Online by first identi- fying how scientific data processing tasks can be embedded into the operation of the game, and then implementing a stand-alone prototype that can commu- nicate with servers at MMOS and CCP.