The design of microstructures that are optimized for a given engineering applications
requires exploration of a rough and high-dimensional configuration space. Gradient-based
algorithms are efficient, but suffer from a propensity to get stuck in local minima. Global-
optimization algorithms are better at finding global minima, but are generally slow to
converge. We developed and tested a Human Computation Game (HCG) for microstructure
design where players interactively manipulate the microstructure to optimize an effective …