Amazon Mechanical Turk

Posted on November 7, 2005, 12:57 pm by E-junkieChef under News

November 02, 2005

Amazon unveiled the "Mechanical Turk" and human powered artificial intelligence service appropriately labeled "artificial artificial intelligence". The idea behind the mechanical Turk is to harness the human element through which Amazon plans to offers a program that has an interface to human intelligence. Peter Cohen, the director of Amazon Web Services software said the advantages of such a system are huge. Cohen said "This program could eliminate so many personnel and training costs -- even temps are expensive, and this allows very small bits of work to be done for very little money."

The basic idea here is to pay small amounts of money to users to perform trivial tasks (called HITS) HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: "Is there a pizza parlor in this photograph?". Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.

Learn more about Amazon Mechanical Turk.

For developers, there is a Mechanical Turk API which they can use to integrate this "Artifical Artifical Intelligence" in their applications. For example, Amazon is using this system to sort pictures of businesses for their A9 maps which show real pictures of businesses (not satellite view).

Verbose from their website "Developers ("Requesters") use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit their HITs to Amazon Mechanical Turk, and approve or reject results when their HITs have been completed. Developers can manage the qualifications they have created and granted to the people working on their HITs. Payment is made automatically when HIT results have been approved."

Amazon will charge a 10% fee on top of what a developer decides to pay for a HIT.

Editor's Notes: I think this can be really useful for sites which have long wait times before an ad, or a picture or piece of content is approved.