Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I came across a cryptic link to mturk.com on supr.c.ilio.us, asking “Isn’t that how the Matrix came to be?”

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate “artificial, artificial intelligence” directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

All software developers need to do is write normal code. The pseudo code below illustrates how simple this can be.

 read (photo);
 photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
 if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE) {
   acceptPhoto;
 }
 else {
   rejectPhoto;
 }

Given the source of the link, I was a little skeptical at first read, but it appears to be a legitimate beta project that just launched yesterday at Amazon. At least, the documentation links point back into Amazon Web Services, and at least one person seems to know someone there.

This is an interesting idea that should find some useful applications. Spammers have supposedly been doing something like this to defeat the image-based Turing tests used to screen comment posting systems, offering access to porn in exchange for solving the puzzles, and there are other anecdotes of using low cost offshore labor for similar tasks. Having a simpler web service interface for finding a human key operator somewhere will probably allow smaller and more experimental applications to emerge.

Update 11-04-2005 08:09 PST - Slashdot, TechDirt, Google Blogoscoped on Mechanical Turk, pointer to BoingBoing on porn puzzles and spam, captcha.net

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Technology, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.