Gadgetory

the New Yorkers cartoon caption contest asks people to come up with a caption for one cartoon a week it's a popular contest but with about five thousand submissions a week the magazine wanted to find a faster way to sift through all those jokes it turned to computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin who created a way for people to vote on submissions we met with cartoon editor Bob mankoff who showed us the new feature from the New Yorkers point of view from our point of view is more engagement on the site and I think it's fun for people to do what will happen is that once it's live on the site thousands of people will be doing this simultaneously the algorithm behind all this is working feverishly to look at the rank how people are judging this and eventually it's trying to bubble up essentially to look at which ones are ranked higher rather than lower for as more people come to judge it and the idea is so that you can as quickly as possible find the rankings okay so it says please rank the entries to this caption contest image then click done button you can rank as many or as few as you like but five is too few and 5,000 is wait so here's the Peter vay drawing and they're all they're all carrying this big briefcase and as if he he wanted to die the way he lives so it's a funeral you still seeing not bad for the record I hate our new business cards so that tempt you certainly have to think about that now all these people are on the one business card it might be a little bit too long to work as a joke that think it's funny you should have to think it out on the other end is clever I'm all for flexible working but this job here and obviously that's a bad capture any caption that ends with but this is ridiculous so that's unfunny it's a lengthy brief compared to the other ones with thumbs on okay now you understand the thousands of these the best way to look at this master this is 5,000 or let's say it's 50,000 it's through crowdsourcing but with people its people are best