Two Carnegie Mellon University researchers using the ESP Game Web site are among a growing number nationwide tapping into human brains for common-sense knowledge to improve AI algorithms.

The game pairs a player with an anonymous Internet partner who are both asked to type in words that describe a series of images. The players win points when they match words and this creates another label researchers can affix to the image in question.

It would take too long for human editors to label every one of the millions of images that can be accessed by search engines and assign five or six word labels to each. But by getting a few thousand people to play the ESP game each day, the researchers hope to accomplish that in a few months.