Space Hopper: a Serious Game Crowdsourcing the Design of Interplanetary Trajectories

Humans have an innate ability to extract important information from data sets or images, but also to solve particular problems on which computers may struggle. Serious gaming, and the related crowdsourcing term, are new computational paradigms attempting to process enormous amounts of scientific data exploiting these innate humans capabilities. In this paper we present Space Hopper, a “serious gaming”experiment aimed at improving interplanetary spacecraft trajectories design techniques and, at the same time, at proving that part of an interplanetary trajectory design can be crowdsourced. Space Hopper exploits and collects data on the users’ problem-solving skills and spatio-temporal reasoning to help formulate a “human-inspired” tree search algorithm allowing efficient traversal of