Human Brain Cloud

August 25, 2007 3:56 PM

Human Brain Cloud is a simple but addictive mutiplayer word association widget with a nifty Flash interface, brought to you by one of the founders of the Experimental Gameplay Project [previously].
posted by whir (10 comments total)

It grabs a bunch of associations, then tells you that you have exceeded your CPU limit. It is some kind of game.
posted by Oyéah at 4:14 PM on August 25, 2007

I was playing with this earlier today. Unfortunately, it gets overloaded too easily.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 4:14 PM on August 25, 2007

Blast! "This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota." Well, hopefully it will be back up soon.
posted by whir at 4:14 PM on August 25, 2007

It seems to go up and down sporadically. In the meantime, here are some thoughts by the author about this project on his blog.
posted by whir at 4:40 PM on August 25, 2007

There was a previous attempt to post this site here, but it's hard to call it a "double" since it was deleted because the site couldn't handle the stress of our interest in it. Still, if we're crashing the site again, as cool as it may be, it's not meant for MetaFilter...
posted by wendell at 4:51 PM on August 25, 2007

Just keep trying. I got in, it's pretty cool. I can see why it's using up so much CPU though.
posted by knowles at 4:53 PM on August 25, 2007

If you're patient with it, it will work eventually. I contacted the site owner after my failed post, and though he assured me that decent hosting was in the works it's been long enough now that I don't think they're really interested in upgrading.

Definitely check out some of the stats the owner gathered up after the first few weeks of HBC uptime.
posted by carsonb at 5:11 PM on August 25, 2007

Here's a fascinating lecture by Luis von Ahn on what he calls "Human Computation" - using massive numbers of people to solve problems that are hard for computers but easy for people, by making the process fun.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 6:25 PM on August 25, 2007

aeschenkarnos - I spent about ten minutes correlating every single word that came up with the word "cheese".

Nobody's "solving" any kind of problem with this method, for any real meaning of "solve".

Also, "The Last Starship" did it first.
posted by jefflowrey at 6:42 PM on August 25, 2007

"If this experiment had an scientific credibility, I’d say humans were more horny than narcissistic or greedy."

Freud said the same thing: only, he called it science.
posted by ZachsMind at 9:00 AM on August 26, 2007