IMCOM · IMGAME Commercial

The idea is to bring to pre-commercial stage two marketable versions of the research software that has been built for use in Prof Collins’ ERC Advanced Grant ‘IMGAME’ (ERC-2010-AdG-269463):1) A new academic IMGAME Research Tool, potentially to be sold under licence to universities and other organisations engaged in social sciences research; and2) A popular game, with the working name Masquerade, which can be played via the internet,using computers or handheld communication devices.In 1950, the famous computer pioneer, Alan Turing, proposed what became widely known as the ‘Turing Test’ which involved testing a hidden machine’s ‘intelligence’ by comparing its written responses to those of a hidden human and the extent to which one group can pretend to be the other – tested over a series of games and measured by the summary statistic, the ‘Identification Ratio’ (IR) – indicates the extent to which that group understands the other. The IR is a brand new measure of social integration and/or cultural understanding – we think it is the first new kind of quantitative measure in the social sciences since the social survey.The object of this proposal, ‘IMCOM’ (IMGAME Commercial), is to move one of the outputs of the core IMGAME grant, i.e. the game software we have developed, onto a pre-commercialisation stage through two commercial avenues as stated above.