Increasing Perfomance via Gamification in a Volunteer-Based Evolutionary Computation System
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This document discusses adding gamification techniques to a volunteer computing system to increase participation. It found that registering users and displaying a leaderboard of top volunteers motivated registered users to participate more intensely than anonymous users. Registered users shared more computing resources over longer periods of time. The gamification approach of competition and social recognition improved user engagement in the volunteer system. Future work could study emerging social networks among volunteers and how to prevent negative effects like cheating from gamification incentives.
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Increasing Perfomance via Gamification in a Volunteer-Based Evolutionary Computation System
- 1. Increasing Performance via Gamification in a Volunteer-Based Evolutionary Computation System Mario García-Valdez1 , Juan J. Merelo Guervós2 , Lucero Lara1 , and Pablo García-Sánchez3 1 Instituto Tecnológico de Tijuana 2 Universidad de Granada 3 Universidad de Cádiz
- 2. Parallel, distributed, asynchronous, ephemeral, adaptive !2
- 3. Where do we run our EAs? !3
- 4. –John Gage, Sun Microsystems “The Network is the Computer” !4
- 5. Available Resources Laptops Desktop Grid Cloud Browsers Smart Devices Volunteers - Socio Technical System
- 6. Volunteer Computing Volunteers are anonymous As anonymous entities they are not accountable Volunteers must trust application providers Service providers must trust volunteers
- 9. JavaScript in all devices Container Virtual Machine Laptop Ephemeral DeviceRepository of Tuples !9
- 10. !10
- 11. Gamification “Gamification is the process by which gaming concepts are brought to real world tasks associated with real people” Huotari, K., Hamari, J.: Defining gamification: a service marketing perspective. In: Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference. pp. 17–22. ACM (2012).
- 14. A Competition Gamification techniques in a volunteer context seeks to persuade users to use their natural desire to compete, learn and socialize in given non-game context application [5, 9]. By Making the rewards for tasks achievements visible to other players or providing leader boards are ways of encouraging players to compete [10].
- 15. Issues Volunteers are no longer anonymous (we do not validate email). They need to create a session (cookie). More steps are needed.
- 16. Issues
- 17. Experiment - Problem Each page visiting the experiment loads an HTTP Web Worker that runs a local island. An island is an evolutionary algorithm to solve a multi- modal problem called L-Trap which has been used extensively as a benchmark for evolutionary algorithms. 40 concatenated L-Traps After 100 Generations an HTTP PUT sends the best individual
- 18. Experiment - Execution “Asking again for your help, we are conducting a computational experiment that requires computer power. Can we borrow some of your CPU? just visit the web page (link) and leave the tab open. Be part of the TOP TEN, register so we can track your participation. The experiment will run until November 27th, Thanks!.” Reached 2000+ people. Message included a deadline. After deadline only Top Volunteers were shown.
- 19. Results Work is measured by the number of HTTP PUT requests Logarithmic scale Registered users in green Anonymous users in red 18 green vs 91 red
- 20. Registered users shared more resources
- 21. Registered users shared more time Registered Users (Green) Anonymous (Blue)
- 22. Extreme users shared many CPUs (Workers) More than 30 workers for some time. Many browsers, tabs or even computers.
- 23. Registered users shared many CPUs (Workers)
- 24. Conclusions In this paper we have added gamification to a volunteer computing system via a leaderboard of contributions of registered users. After applying the gamification techniques, registered users participated much more intensely than anonymous ones. The fact that applying a gamification technique improved user participation highlights the social nature of volunteer computing systems, piling on the fact that successful social clouds must embed games and other social mechanisms to enhance participation.
- 25. Future Work Since it is a socio-technical system, including social features in it and studying emerging social networks is an interesting line of work. Other factors, such as the language used, the way the experiment is announced, are also very important in this social context along with the study of the behavior of users as they are participating in the web system. Another line of work would be to study the possible negative effects of using gamification techniques to improve engagement, like cheating or literally gaming the system to defeat competition.