Comments on: This is What I Learned About Humans! (interesting stats on Human Brain Cloud)

By: headlight

headlight — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:52:54 +0000

I love the work you do! I love the Zoners who get this far too!

By: Sid

Sid — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:30:16 +0000

Strangely addictive - Damm you

By: Niru

Niru — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:50:36 +0000

Ooh, this sounds great - I await the game’s reappearance with bated breath. :D

Until then I’ll mope around some.

By: Le zapping Google du 21 février 2008 | Qualis Opinions

Le zapping Google du 21 février 2008 | Qualis Opinions — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:28:52 +0000

[…] un calamar géant ! Il y a des statistiques d’utilisation de cette sympathique machine sur le blog de l’auteur mais aussi en cliquant sur l’onglet […]

By: Ladyluck523

Ladyluck523 — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:49:43 +0000

I’ve always enjoyed words and language. This is a fun way to see how you ‘tick’. I’ll be spreading the uh…word :)

By: Crank

Crank — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:03:09 +0000

I made a new game,

1) think of a word
2) go to view cloud
3) try and find it using word association.

Excellent site, great fun.

By: KILLroy13

KILLroy13 — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:46:38 +0000

LOLest Game ever.. =)

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:11:55 +0000

Hey Ive been following you for a while, and I love your style, both artistic and creative, Im a fellow EGPer and I was wondering if 2dboy is acepting interns? Now about the game, I had alot of fun playing with a couple of my friends over skype, and Id love to see multilingule support

By: Jerry Lee Lewiston

Jerry Lee Lewiston — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 04:47:56 +0000

“The Internet is an elite organization. Most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.”

Something to keep in mind about the “human nature” question and the top ten. This isn’t the human race you’re sampling from, but narrower group with a strong background. The narcissism is disappointing as ever, but not surprising.

By: lon

lon — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 01:01:24 +0000

From what I’ve read about this experiment/game, it really sounds like people had a blast playing it. I just wish I found out about this mini-game sooner. =(

By: reece

reece — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:03:11 +0000

I assocated “zag” with “zig” and “scoot” with “around the corner” and they’re ALL in the song “bop to the top!”

By: shino

shino — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 06:47:24 +0000

i got the new phrase

‘i like pie’

YAY

By: William

William — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:12:53 +0000

Kyle - aha, well that explains what’s going on. I can understand where you’re coming from with wanting a very broad dataset, but isn’t the point of the word association game to demonstrate a chain of consciousness between the user and the game? Obviously, most of the players here are having a good time with the game as is, but for me, if I’m going to be teaching the bot, I’d like to see him demonstrate some intelligence in return. And when I see random tokens come up, it goes against what I’d expect. Humbly, I don’t see the fun in the game unless it is trying to respond in a smart way.

One of the most interesting things I got out of the Lost association game and my earlier wide-open versions was watching them learn from an empty dataset. I gave it a dozen seed words and then let it learn. It was stupid at first, but depending on the number of players and the minimum token and link strength I required, it learned very fast. And to watch it reach the “tipping point” where it started acting smart was pretty exciting. Anyway, I’m rambling now. :)

Did you write the Flash link viewer yourself or is it open source? I’m interested in implementing something similar for my games, but I’m a humble programmer and don’t know flash.

By: Kyle Gabler

Kyle Gabler — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:44:05 +0000

William - oh yeah, that’s because in the “play” mode, the words you receive are completely unrelated! :) If they were related, play sessions would follow a chain of consciousness, and I wanted to avoid that. My reasoning was that the network would grow wider and more reliably if input words were randomly selected.

Interesting Lost associator - I hope they are paying you!

By: William

William — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:25:54 +0000

Kyle, the aim/msn version worked great, but 90% of the time, I was in a battle with flooders and spammers. Spam was easy to deal with using token and link strength to weed out the junk. But flooders were difficult because, especially with the AIM version, you had to deal with message limits. Anyway, a web version is definitely the way to go. And now I understand the usefulness of your spam button. Revenge can be sweet. :)

The view page works great. I get words definitely associated with ‘fruit’, like ‘mango’, ‘kiwi’, etc. But with game play, I type in ‘fruit’ and get ‘figure skater’. Again and I get ‘eight nine ten’. I don’t know what’s up with that.

BTW, if you’re interested, I have a Lost (the tv show) themed version of my word association game at http://www.deepgorge.com/lost/ - it isn’t as clean and organized as yours, but it works pretty well. Give it a try if you can. Thanks.

By: Kyle Gabler

Kyle Gabler — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:32:06 +0000

Thanks guys, several people have requested I add support for other languages, so that will be the next big thing when I get some time.

William - Cool, how did the aim/msn version work out? Yeah, link strength alone is absolutely enough to filter the words. The flagging buttons simply help junk words move away faster, not to mention they act as a bit of an apology to players who might be offended when a naughty word pops up and they want revenge. Revenge in the form of a spam button. It works well for everyone. :) Hmm.. not sure where you are getting those connection results ie. for “fruit” - were you using the “view” page? Try this http://humanbraincloud.com/view.php?w=fruit

By: William

William — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:34:05 +0000

I’m a little surprised everyone is referring to this as an original, novel idea. The word association game has been on the web and IM for at least 5 years. I personally wrote an AIM/MSN version over 4 years ago after seeing other poorly implemented versions.

To the creator: there should be no need to flag wrong words or misspellings. The brain should be able to do that on its own, through the link strength mechanism you are describing. Junk works, spam, misspelling should all be filtered to the bottom and appear rarely.

Also, I have to say the brain isn’t very smart. From ‘fruit’, it came up with ‘imbibed’, from ‘drunk’, it came up with ‘430kmh’, from ’scientist, I get ‘cabbage patch’. Am I missing something? Neither of those make any sense. I can see that it is showing common matches on the right side, but is it actually trying to make smart replies or not, because it clearly isn’t.

Good try, the interface is simple and nice, but the game could use some “brains”.

By: Tim Jones

Tim Jones — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:18:10 +0000

This game is doing dangerous things to my neurons! But, speaking as someone born in England who now lives in New Zealand, it would be interesting to know how the network differs according to the country of origin of the players. There are associations that come readily to my mind that might not occur to an American, and vice versa. I’d love to see how the networks created by different nationalities differed, if that was feasible. In any case, this is one of the best and most elegant web applications I’ve ever seen - well done!

By: web.XpunktNull.de » Have a look inside your brain

web.XpunktNull.de » Have a look inside your brain — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:43:34 +0000

[…] Multiplayer Word Association Game (MMWAG?). Macht Laune - probiert es aus. Hilft uns das weiter? Logo! […]

By: The Human Brain Cloud - word association for the masses | BlogSchmog

The Human Brain Cloud - word association for the masses | BlogSchmog — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:53:25 +0000

[…] July, Gabler published some early statistics when the network was about one-fifth its current size. The Human Brain Cloud has the potential to […]

By: Manuel

Manuel — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 07:57:07 +0000

This is too funny. And highly addictive
i see you can change your name at the bottom, but can you use that name again and again? like a kind of login?
You could give active members with a login rising credibility, according to how strong their words and connections are

By: Nikmak

Nikmak — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 02:12:08 +0000

That was excellent. Funny and interesting!

By: Jona

Jona — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 13:56:34 +0000

Thank you, it’s really tripping experience!

By: Katafrog

Katafrog — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:54:49 +0000

Great work. Simple yet highly effective. This would be a fantastic way to build a social translation engine. One that would reflect real spoken language vs academically correct translations. Just a thought. Thanks again for entertaining us!

By: Reading the Media with Robotic Consumerist Brains « Digerati Boombati

Reading the Media with Robotic Consumerist Brains « Digerati Boombati — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 01:52:25 +0000

[…] Building a media literacy curriculum seems taxing, among other things, but as the teachers interviewed by Hobbs reveal, their is a great payoff: gratification, pride, a sense of accomplishment. I tend to get bored with things pretty quickly, and honestly, one of my most pressing fears about student teaching in the spring concerns myself getting bored with teaching the same lesson four or five times per day possibly, especially if I’m required to teach my host teacher’s lesson. When the text studied remains the same and the possibilities for discussion are limited, to an extent, I can see myself getting bored. But, the idea of bringing media literacy into the curriculum and having students contribute media texts of many genres and many tastes about many subjects is invigorating and seems like it is likely to remain that way. Just today I came across this Human Brain Cloud, a site which has a word association game and plugs the words into a huge, searchable brain cloud for users to explore. It’s a social experiment, says the creator. The “game” is quite fun and interesting. You learn a good deal about the way your brain works in a short period of time, or at least you have the potential to. It’s very likely that many people play the game thoughtless of the associations they are making, but I’d love to create an environment where potentially a student could come in and show the Human Brain Cloud to the class and examine the way that mass media and, particularly, marketing iconography and slogans have taken over our consciousness. In fact, the creator of the cloud presented some of his own findings on the brain cloud blog: […]