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Amazon's Mechanical Turk
rscoggin writes "Amazon.com has a new program that wants you to 'Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.' (example: 'Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?'). For each task you complete you get a small payment, usually ranging from a few cents to a little under a dollar. It's named the Amazon Mechanical Turk after a famous hoax from the 19th century. Kill time and get paid in tiny increments to boot!" Similar to Google Answers, there seems to be a reliability ratings system and some incentives.
Actually, yes. The whole motivation from this came from the same person who invented the CAPTCHA, and was explained in his thesis defense on Wednesday. Abstract for those who care:
Subject: Thesis Oral - Luis von Ahn
November 2, 2005
Luis von Ahn
12:00 PM, 3305 Newell-Simon Hall
Thesis Oral
Title: Human Computation
Abstract:
Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to
challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This thesis
introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve
problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to
solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel
approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games.
For example, the ESP Game, introduced in this thesis, is an enjoyable
online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people
play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These
keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image
search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because
they enjoy it.
I introduce three other examples of games with a purpose: Peekaboom,
which helps determine the location of objects in images, Phetch, which
collects paragraph descriptions of arbitrary images to help
accessibility of the Web, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense
knowledge. I also show that, in principle, every problem that could be
solved by a computer, today or in the future, could be solved using
enjoyable computer games.
In addition, I introduce CAPTCHAs, automated tests that humans can pass
but computer programs cannot. CAPTCHAs take advantage of human
processing power in order to differentiate humans from computers, an
ability that has important applications in practice.
The results of this thesis are currently in use by hundreds of Web sites
and companies around the world, and some of the games presented here
have been played by over 100,000 people. Practical applications of this
work include improvements in problems such as: image search,
adult-content filtering, spam, common-sense reasoning, computer vision,
accessibility, and security in general.
Thesis Committee:
Manuel Blum, Chair
Takeo Kanade
Michael Reiter
Josh Benaloh, Microsoft Research
Jitendra Malik, University of California, Berkeley
Well, mturk.amazon.com redirects you to www.mturk.com... seems to imply something.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Amazon has a page on their site about MTurk
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Time out of Joint
We're grateful to have been Slashdotted! Our beta site, mturk.amazon.com, is experiencing the Slashdot effect. You can still read about Amazon Mechanical Turk and its web services APIs at www.amazon.com/webservices. Also, send a blank email to aws@amazon.com if you want us to email you when page load times recover. The Amazon Mechanical Turk Team