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The Mechanical Turk

  • April 17, 2007 at 10:53 pm

    #172076

    Mechanical Turk

    I stumbled across Amazon's Mechanical Turk while helping search for Jim Gray. As a side note, Jim is still missing and presumed dead after an exhaustive search by the Coast Guard and many of Jim's friends.

    The Mechanical Turk is based on the mechanical chess playing machine created in the late 1800s. It turned out to be a fake, with a human inside, and that is what Amazon has built. They have a way for you to distribute a workload and let humans work on the problem, or a very small piece of the problem. Similar to a super computer, but this process uses humans for things that artificial intelligence can't handle.

    The basic idea is you create some task, for example one of the items I looked at was reviewing a list of vendor names associated with a contract for the city of Tulsa. It's a data task that might not be easy to implement in something like SSIS, but a human can easily complete it. And get paid!

    Maybe not much, in this case $0.02 per item, but it's a good way to distribute the workload.

    If you can find someone to work on the task. I guess if you wanted to fund a book habit at Amazon, it might be worth taking a few minutes here and there to look through data tasks and earn some money.

    I completed two and earned myself $.07 🙂

    Steve Jones

  • April 18, 2007 at 8:52 am

    #701143

    Coool... I wonder if they are feeding a neural net or something in order to automate the process in the future. Seems like the logical conclusion for a project like that...

  • April 18, 2007 at 12:58 pm

    #701231

    I found this awhile back - not sure if it was a link on here or Database Daily, but I remember finding it to be an interesting link.  I do mturk things every now and then, but I am an amazon.com junkie, so that's really my motivation. 

  • April 19, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    #701554

    Looks like it's out of order now - maybe too many people trying to get "rich" quick?

    I would think my time would be worth more than .02 per minute, but no one around here wants my .02 worth, anyway, so...

  • April 19, 2007 at 5:10 pm

    #701602

    I hope one day Microsoft will share his mathematical work on Transaction processing that is not part of trade secret, I will miss his contribution to computing like standardizing SQL. 

    http://www.ddj.com/dept/database/197003537

    Kind regards,
    Gift Peddie

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