The EyeWire Games: How to Ballpark Your Team’s Progress
The EyeWire Games are off to a spectacular start!
Over 50,000 people visited EyeWire yesterday. We experienced a massive surge of players from a post by Facebook’s I F*ing Love Science and then trended on Reddit for several hours. Currently, over 4,600 people have declared their teams. The breakdown is below.
We’re working on calculating complete team stats. For now, here’s a breakdown explaining how you can ballpark team progress in real time.
Click “change cell” to see the following list (remember to do this every time you open EyeWire to make sure you’re mapping for your team).
What do the values mean?
“Current Size” is the number of cells your team has generated. This is a good ballpark of progress relative to other teams. More cubes tends to mean more neuron volume.
“Growth in 24h” is the number of cubes your team has generated in the past 24 hours. This number may be larger than “current size” — we’ll get to why in a moment.
“Available” is a relative metric. You have x cubes available for your team based on how many you have already completed. Generally, the more people who play, the more cubes will become available.
The last 5 rows, titles “Team [ name ] Completed,” are where move synapses that are not from the specific synaptic network we are trying to map. In order to understand this, we need to look a bit into the science of EyeWire with an explanation from a previous blog entry:
What looks like random pieces of neurons in your team’s main window are are actually far from random. These are synapses that connect to J Cell #1, the first neuron completed by EyeWirers. Our advanced neuron analysts in lab have found synapse points on these pieces that they think come from Starburst cells. However, they can’t be sure of this – we need your help to see where they all really come from!
In EyeWire, our immediate goal is to understand how Starburst cells connect to J Cells in order to understand how these cells network together to possibly help process motion perception. As your team extends the cubes from a synapse point, it becomes evident which type of cell you are mapping. If our experts determine that you are mapping a cell that is not a starburst cell, we move that synapse and dendrite to the view titles “Team [name] Completed.” This keeps your main window from becoming too cluttered and helps us maintain the ability to stay on top of mergers (mapping mistakes “merging” two cells together — these lead to lost time and effort). These completed cubes will likely count toward your team’s overall progress.
The “Current Size” value for the first five rows (titled Reddit, Facebook, Team X, Twitter and Google+) is therefore the most accurate predictor of the team that is in the lead.
Stay tuned — more stats are coming soon.
Got questions? We’ve got answers. Check out EyeWire’s FAQ Wiki. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Ask in the Forums or on our Facebook Page.