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Active Distributed Computing Projects - Distributed Human Projects

These links take you to other project categories on this site:

Science   Life Sciences   Cryptography   Internet   Financial
Mathematics   Art   Puzzles/Games   Miscellaneous   Distributed Human Projects
Collaborative Knowledge Bases   Charity

See the bottom of this page for a description of the icons on the page.

Project Information Project % Complete Major Supported Platforms
 
Distributed Human Projects
Participate in Mindpixel, a project in which you can help teach an artificially intelligent computer program to think more like a human by asking it questions. ongoing: 1,435,350 mindpixels N/A
Help teach computers to understand human "common sense" in the Open Mind Commonsense project, a project which will create a repository of basic human knowledge.

Users can participate in many activites from describing the things that someone should know to fully understand an event to explaining the relationship between a pair of words or to describing a picture.

This project is part of the OpenMind Initiative to develop "intelligent" software.

ongoing: 15,229 registered users have submitted 724,281 items. N/A
Help teach computers how to interpret English words with multiple meanings in the context of sentences in the Open Mind Word Expert project. Users can play a free word game to teach computers about word meanings.

In July, 2003, this project began similar foreign-langauge projects:

This project is part of the OpenMind Initiative to develop "intelligent" software.

ongoing N/A
Help teach computers about every-day things in the Open Mind 1001 Questions project. Users teach Learner, an Artificial Intelligence system, by choosing a topic to talk about and answering questions that Learner asks about the topic.

This project is part of the OpenMind Initiative to develop "intelligent" software.

ongoing N/A
Distributed Proofreaders Help proofread electronic texts for Project Gutenberg (PG) at Distributed Proofreaders (DP).

On February 19, 2003, DP posted its 1,000th project to PG. In August, 2003, the project set a record of 129,273 pages proofread in one month. On September 3, 2003, DP posted its 2,000th project. On October 15, 2003, PG published its 10,000th ebook, a goal which was set in 1971. On January 14, 2004, DP posted its 3,000th project. On April 8, 2004, DP posted its 4,000th book. On August 21, 2004, DP posted its 5,000th project. On October 8, 2004, DP posted its 5,000th unique title.

To participate, create an account, then select a proofreading project from a list. A proofreading interface is displayed in your web browser, and you can proofread pages for the project one at a time. The project has personal stats pages and rankings for proofreaders so that each proofreader can see how he or she is doing compared to other proofreaders. You can also become a project manager and prepare proofreading projects for the site, and you can reassemble proof-read projects for submission to Project Gutenberg.

Join a discussion forum about this project.

Audio versions of some of the books in Project Gutenberg are being created in the Radio Gutenberg project.

ongoing:
5,979 projects posted to PG;
5,608 books completed
N/A
Distributed Proofreaders Europe Help proofread electronic texts at Distributed Proofreaders Europe. This project "is a service of Project Gutenberg Europe, Project Rastko, and the Global Translation Project. It has the ability [to proofread] books in any Unicode-supported language."

The project submitted its first book to Project Gutenberg on February 9, 2004.

To participate, create an account, then select a proofreading project from a list. A proofreading interface is displayed in your web browser, and you can proofread pages for the project one at a time. The project has personal stats pages and rankings for proofreaders so that each proofreader can see how he or she is doing compared to other proofreaders. You can also become a project manager and prepare proofreading projects for the site, and you can reassemble proof-read projects for submission to Project Gutenberg.

Join a discussion forum about this project.

ongoing:
75 books completed
N/A
Contribute a verse to a song about the New Economy at Geektones - Gods of the New Economy distributed songwriting project. This isn't a serious project, but it's funny :-) ongoing N/A
Track how many keys you type in Project Orca. The Win32 client tracks your total number of keystrokes and periodically reports that total to the project server. You can compete against other project members and teams in the stats. This project doesn't really contribute to the greater good of humanity (unless it makes us use more calories by typing more); it's just for fun. The project is a continuation of the original Project Dolphin.

Version 0.96 of the client is available as of January 20, 2003.

Join a discussion forum about the project.

ongoing:
14,396,553,323 total keystrokes
by 4,847 users,
409.69 average keys/second
Windows 32
Tiny KeyCounter is another project which lets you track your total number of keystrokes and periodically reports that total to the project server. It also tracks the number of times you press a mouse button or the mouse scroll-wheel. You can compete against other project members and teams in the stats. The project is just for fun.

Join a discussion forum about the project.

ongoing Windows 32
Project Dolphin is the old Project Dolphin, restarted by a new project coordinator. It lets you track your total number of keystrokes and periodically reports that total to the project server. You can compete against other project members and teams in the stats. The project is just for fun.

Version 0.95 of the client is currently available.

ongoing:
115,360,341,146 total keys
Windows 32
Projet Marmotte tracks the distance traveled by your computer mouse and periodically reports that distance to the project server. You can compete against other project members, teams and countries in the stats. The project is just for fun. The website is written in French, but babelfish provides a reasonable English translation of it.

Version 2.2 of the client is currently available.

ongoing Windows 32
20Q.net Twenty Questions, "the neural net on the Internet," is an experimental artificial intelligence system which asks you to think of an object and then tries to quess what the object is by asking you twenty (more or less) questions. It learns from the answers you give to its questions. The more people play this game with it, the more it learns.

You can help test beta version 6 if you are interested.

ongoing N/A
Help teach indoor mobile robots to be smarter in the Open Mind Indoor Common Sense project. This project will create a repository of knowledge which will enable people to create more intelligent mobile robots for use in home and office enviornments.

Starting on June 1, 2004, the project is offering participants a US$25 Amazon.com gift certificate if they submit 500 accepted entries (100 of which must be star entries). Only entries submitted after June 1 will count. Each participant can earn a maximum of 4 gift certificates. A maximum of 50 gift certificates will be awarded. 31 gift certificates have been awarded as of November 29, 2004.

This project is part of the OpenMind Initiative to develop "intelligent" software.

ongoing: 655 registered users have submitted 49,674 items. N/A
BeWeS MouseTracker tracks the distance traveled by your computer mouse, and the number of times you click it, and periodically reports that information to the project server. You can compete against other project members and teams, and you can win a prize if you are the first person to reach a distance goal. The project is just for fun. The project's current distance goal is around the world.

The client is currently available only for Windows. The latest version of the client is available as of October 30, 2003.

Join a discussion forum about the project.

ongoing:
238,700 Km. (148,321 miles) total distance
Windows 32
Track your computer's uptime (the time it has been running since it was last restarted) in the Uptime Project. Note that the website is written in German, but babelfish provides a reasonable translation. The client periodically reports your computer's uptime to the project server. You can compete against other project members and teams in the stats. This project is just for fun.

Version 0.22 beta of the client is available for Windows. Version 0.4.0 of the client is available for Linux and FreeBSD.

Join a discussion forum about the project (via a link on the project website). The discussion forum is in German.

ongoing:
3820y 2d 06h 44m 58s total uptime
by 18,869 users
Windows 32
Linux
NEW!

Help The ESP Game label images on the Internet. The project presents a Java applet game to volunteers. A pair of volunteers is shown a series of images and must type the same one-word description of an image within a time limit. The more images the pair tags, and the faster they type the same description, the more points they score. Each volunteer's points accumulate. The project associates a set of one-word descriptions for each of the images it indexes. The images can be searched through the project site.

To participate in the project, sign up for a user account, then click on the Play Now button. Your browser should load a Java applet in a new window and provide further instructions for playing the game.

ongoing:
5,718,712 images labeled
N/A

The following icons may appear in the Supported Platforms section of the table:
dialup-friendlythis project is good for users with dialup Internet access
paid projectthis is a for-pay project
Windows 32this project runs on the Windows 32-bit platform
Linuxthis project runs on the Linux platform
MacOSthis project runs on the Mac OS platform
Solaristhis project runs on the Solaris platform

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