The Evolution of Human Computation: Past, Present and Future

Human computation is a technique that utilizes human abilities to perform computation tasks that are difficult for computers to process. Since the concept of human computation was introduced in 2003, many applications have been developed in an ad hoc manner and a large number of published works have focused on different aspects of human computation, such as computational techniques and performance analysis. To understand how to apply human computation to solve different problems today, it is important to understand how human computation evolves and why it happens. In light of the achievements of human computation so far, we consider what the future may hold for this relatively new field.