It's going to be 96 degrees here today and missing the cool breeze of Seattle, but find comfort in my native coffee company.  Only wish the internet were free...

Check out Luis von Ahn a computer science researcher from Carnegie Mellon.  He has created some incredible games.  I especially like esp in which you and an anonymous partner guess until you agree about the names of images. This game is similar in structure to the Turing test which I'll explain in another blog.  But leave it to say that von Ahn estimates that in 2003, humans spent 7 billion hours (yes, 7 billion) playing solitaire on the computer.  He is setting out to eliminate wasted human mind-space by using games to tag pictures on the net.

I was so impressed by a presentation that he gave at Google (which is on his site) that I e-mailed him to ask what he thought were the skills that humans still do better than humans. He said that among other things, like responding to visual and auditory stimulus, human intelligence exceeds computer intelligence in common sense reasoning.  At least for now. 

And this morning, it defies my common sense reasoning that 22 people are waiting for coffee in the Starbucks line.  And I may even go back for a refill.