Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Ask the Audience - Take the Majority.

So you're on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and you have question that you don't know. It may not be all that difficult but you just don't know the answer to it.

So you ask the audience.

When you ask the audience you take the response with the highest percentage. You go for the majority as you don't know these people and you can't trust their knowledge.

The same would be true if you were to use internet users to provide answers, as the ReCAPTCHA people are doing. They are using captchas as a way as identifying words in old books and manuscripts.

To ensure that the word they get back is actually the correct word, they ask the same question to two people, if they both agree, fine. If not, they ask more people until they have a majority vote.

One of the main problems with the Javascript stream processing algorithm is the worry of hackers doping the results. But, by asking the same question of multiple browsers - by asking the audience - you can be very sure of getting the correct answer.