BTW, do you object to the use of bots in http://espgame.org?
Did you even know that it uses bots sometimes?
Did you even know that it uses bots sometimes?
That's different than using bots to interact with legitimate users.
Watch Luis von Ahn's presentation of the ESP game at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=carnegie+mellon+image+game. It's very entertaining and you'll even learn why spammers host free porn sites even though they aren't in the porn business.
"Having pre-recorded game play is especially useful when the game is still gaining popularity. When there are few players, only a single person will usually be playing the game at a time."
So the ESP Game does use bots to make the site look busy.
I always thought that's one reason his games are so clever. You get better data out this way, too. Seems perfectly legit to me.
It's still misleading. The player is expecting to play with another human being live.
But for Phetch:
"Emulating Seekers in a convincing manner is more difficult. If a real player enters useless descriptions of the image, we do not want the emulated Seekers to find it. Although this is not a significant problem since most Describers enter accurate descriptions of images, we nevertheless address it to protect the illusion that a real game is being played. The solution to the problem relies on the fact that we are using images from the ESP Game database, so the keywords associated with the images in the search engine are already known. Therefore, we emulate Seekers by not guessing the right image until a certain number of the ESP keywords have been entered by the Describer."
http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2005/CMU-CS-05-193.pdf#page=56