Mechanic Turk API has humans answering questions |
Loading ...Sometimes the best artificial intelligence isn’t artificial.
That’s the premise behind the Mechanical Turk whose name derives from a Hungarian nobleman named Wolfgang von Kempelen who travelled the world with this supposed mechanical chess program that secreted a master chess player inside.
Have an Amazon account? Sure you do. Check out the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service which will allow you to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) to Amazon to tap a well of human beings willing to answer questions for pennies.
From the Mechanical Turk API:
Mechanical Turk posts your application’s questions to the Mechanical Turk web site, where they are found and answered by Mechanical Turk users. Your application then retrieves the answers using the web service. From your application’s perspective, Mechanical Turk behaves like any other asynchronous web service: Your application submits the request using a programmatic interface, then retrieves the result of that request from the service at a later time.
An example of a HIT that pays the worker $0.03: “You are presented with the name and address of a business as well as a set of photos taken along the street where the business is supposed to be located. Your task is to identify the best photo of the business that is listed.”
From the developer side I see how this could be useful for having an inexpensive Q & A guy/gal (from what I saw, the requester sets the price), but I’m not convinced the human worker is getting a very good deal in this piecemeal arrangement. Amazon? Not bad for them. They get 10% for being the facilliatator of the transaction. Hmm.
Google Blogoscoped points out who can currently use the system: “As far as I understand it, the service at the moment – at least for Requesters – is only available in the US (you can sign-in from anywhere, but you are asked to transfer money from a US bank to your Requester account).”
What do you think about this program?
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I played with it. While the Q/A part is a pretty good idea, the service behind it sucks. I know it’s beta, but when they released it, they had no power behind it. It got Digg’d and the it was tremendously slow, as well as things that you clicked would work half the time, and not the other half.
To me, betaware should be pretty much almost release ware and looking for the public to find the round of bugs that a developer/test team missed. While Mechanical Turk looks like a sound service, it totally turns me off with the beta being as shoddy as it was.
Comment by darkmoon — November 4, 2005 @ 3:03 pm PST
darkmoon - it’s amazing how we expect more of beta these days than we probably should, isn’t it? Beta used to mean something different than it means today. A lot of stuff being sent out as ‘beta’ is actually barely developer preview quality these days and some of the release stuff is what used to be considered beta. I used to not even want to review beta stuff because I didn’t think it was fair to the project and nowadays it’s commonplace to review beta.
Comment by TDavid — November 4, 2005 @ 4:40 pm PST
well.. I suppose it’s strange. I look at some betas and see what others could call release candidates. Others are in shoddy conditions like M.Turk. The way I look at it… Turk should have never made it to public beta in this standing. This should have been strictly a closed beta, with a test group. It seems to me that they just throw it out to the world after they’re done and hope they can gain something from it.
I’m not saying that Google is any better, but much of their “betas” seem a lot more refined than this product.
I suppose nowadays, it’s all about first to market and not how crappy your code runs. Totally against old school thought, but hey.
Comment by darkmoon — November 4, 2005 @ 4:58 pm PST
I spent a few hours with it. It seemed fun and a good way to earn a few exrta bucks. Unfortunately, in most of the pictures it is hard to find the business, and sometimes, it is the wrong block. I gave it my best, and they still rejected up to 50 percent of my submissions. I wrote to ask if the choice “none of the above” meant an automatic rejection, even when it is the correct choice, but there was no answer. In the end, working as fast as I could, I was able to finish 250 in one hour. Unfortunately, they rejected half, paying me 3.60 for my time. Do not waste your time with it! Pick up cans outside, you will make more money.
Comment by Smirch — November 21, 2005 @ 9:14 pm PST
[…] Maybe something like Mechanical Turk could assist with: weeding out and/or penalizing authorities that make these type of bare bones “me too” posts. I don’t want to read them, they are a waste of my time. Unless it’s some sort of black or white poll, I really don’t care if Blogger A agrees with Blogger B and Blogger C if that’s all Blogger A’s post has to contribute, even if Blogger A is the most popular and linked-to blogger in the source list. […]
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