EVE Technology Lab

Hi all,

A conference attract my attention during the 2015 FanFest, but I was not able to found info regarding it. Is it possible to know more about what was discuss and what are behind those "research" ?

Thanks,

//Rethe Henney


// From the Fanfest 2015 Schedule

Crowd Science in EVE Online
The EVE Team is working with the Swiss startup Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) and Reykjavik University on the potential of bringing real world science into the EVE game experience. Hear about how you can solve scientific problems in proteomics, malaria diagnosis or exoplanet research, and join the roundtable discussions to give us your feedback.

//

Excellent, thanks :)

so those are all problems which are difficult to solve for computers. Does it also mean that once a human went through the "minigame", it would be hard for a computer to rate the result?

Transforming it into a minigame would only work if a program can distinguish between a result from someone pressing random buttons and a result of someone who gave the best to solve the problem. Or do i miss something?

If multiple players get the same task and 9/10 come up with an equal result it should be pretty accurate.
If you want to have 10/10 you can give out this task at a later point.

Would I participate?
Sure. I think it's safe to say that most of us have lost a close friend or even family to cancer and that would be more then enough motivation for me to "play" this minigame while spacetrucking my freighter to Jita or mining or waiting for a ping or ...

When I first heard of it my initial thoughts were:
"Earth: cancer. New Eden: Joveian Disease"

I don't know CCPs plan for the Jove... but this minigame could offer a lot of gameplay for the roleplaying community.

Right now you have few possibilities to roleplay a scientist. A POS dedicated to search for radio signals... able to detect something like Caroline's Star... counting wormholes openin and closing like earthquakes, stuff like that just don't exist.

But we do have parts of a Jove body (teleportation gone wrong) which could be the source of the pictures this scientific project delivers.

Now "This is EVE" and only few players might do something without reward. How to avoid creating a new ISK faucet?

Just a random draft:
Playing the minigame will give you X Research Points once your results are confirmed. Once a week, once a month, as long as it takes.
Those Research Points can be redeemed into a tradeable... token... whatever.
You can choose to sell this token on the market (no / low NPC buyorders) or "activate" it. Activation will count the number of Research Points to your character, your corporation or your alliance.
Create a list like the bounty list where players/corps/alliances are ranked with their Research Points (all-time and on a monthly basis).

I'm pretty confident there are several scientific-roleplay-orientated players / corps happily buying them off the market to compete with each other - just because of :fame: or the chance to be featured on a Scope News report.

Some could roleplay the Research Points to their "de-minmatarification" studies, others would roleplay researching Drifters, next will "do scientific researches" for the Arek'jaalan project, ...

It feels like a win:win... players not interested in lore / roleplaying stuff could make ISK and players interested in lore / roleplaying would have something to "fight" each other.

You have to keep in mind that the motivation for someone who joins the effort on a crowd science site is not the same as someone who is playing a spaceship game. If the minigame "find a crater" would give us benefits for planetary interaction or "find the bad cells" would do that for manufacturing, i can guarantee you that players will try to game the game without best intentions for science.

I would highly recommend to ad a safety mechanism to those minigames. Google combined for example text recognition problem with computer generated captcha. The user is shown two capcha segments. One is text scanned from a book, the other is computer generated. The user is supposed to recognize both and fill the right text into the box. However, google only knows the right answer from the computer generated part - if its wrong the captcha fails. The text book part is used to help convert scanned books into text. This only works because google assumes that most people who do the captcha don't know that half of it is actually not used for the human-or-bot check - the other half is "for science".

you could do the same in the minigames. Combine tasks where you already know the right answer too, with tasks you don't know the right answer. If a player tries to manipulate the game and fails at the task you know the answer to he would fail at the minigame.

It looked booring honestly, but better than mining. Maybe if they would involve ISK in it people would feel more inclined to do that? Or 5 Aurum for bonus round of ten perfectly matched pictures?