NEWS
Amazon.com has unveiled a new service that aims to leverage the power of human intelligence as a way to tackle high volumes of repeatable tasks.
Borrowing from the sleight of hand of an 18th century Hungarian nobleman, the service - known as Amazon Mechanical Turk - is a marketplace where developers can post small manual tasks that are part of larger software processes. Individuals who complete the tasks are paid a small fee.
Mechanical Turk is named for Wolfgang von Kempelen's 1769 chess-playing automaton that beat nearly all challengers thanks to a human chess master hidden deep inside the so-called machine. The service is ostensibly about employing human brainpower to solve large numbers of small problems that computers are ill equipped to address.
Adam Selipsky, Amazon's vice president of product management and developer relations, said: "The premise behind Amazon Mechanical Turk is that there are certain things that human beings do better than computers. Mechanical Turk allows developers and businesses to programmatically integrate human intelligence into software applications."
As an example, Amazon's director of web service software Peter Cohen pointed to the company's A9 search service and its yellow pages feature. That service offers users photographs of, for example, pizza restaurants near specific addresses. But he said that asking a computer to choose the best one from a number of possible images isn't practical. A person, on the other hand, could make such a decision in seconds.
And because many of the tasks posted on the marketplace can similarly be finished in seconds or minutes, the pay for them is frequently in the three-to-five cents range. But someone working to help choose pictures for A9, Cohen suggested, could earn enough money to make it worth their while over time.
And of course, Amazon hopes the marketplace will be worth its while as well. Cohen said the company will collect a 10 per cent fee for brokering deals between developers and those fulfilling their tasks.
To Philipp Lenssen, the author of the blog, Google Blogoscoped, Mechanical Turk is a valuable approach to a long-standing challenge.
Lenssen said: "In programming, there are certain types of problems which are very hard - or impossible, as of now - to solve. Take, for example, the question every child could answer: in this photo, is there a woman or a man? It would take one second for a five-year-old. But for a computer programmer, this could become the job of a lifetime to automate."
Lenssen said he's particularly interested in Amazon's new tool because it's very similar to an idea he had proposed last March called the Collaborative Human Interpreter. The concept, he wrote at the time, was "a programming language to query a global brain, tackling previously impossible-to-automate problems".
Ultimately, he added, approaches such as the Mechanical Turk or his CHI are useful because "they make available to the programmer the power of the masses".
In any case, Amazon acknowledges that the Mechanical Turk is still too new to know exactly what kind of tasks will dominate the marketplace.
The service will be driven by the unanticipated needs of people with projects that don't exist yet, leaving Cohen and Selipsky to look forward to seeing what emerges.
Selipsky said: "It's the early days, and we want to be surprised. We expect [people] to come up with exciting and unanticipated applications."
Daniel Terdiman writes for CNET News.com
Comments
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1. anonymous
amazon got it badly wrong with the Turk's launch!
it was obviously not going to interest anyone at the very slow speeds, it was also obvious that most pictures were inappropriate, so it made most sense just to hammer on "none of the above" like a rat pressing a lever.
amazon also neglected to consider that browser images can be switched off, which was rectified later. now, having made people play fair, the site cannot load the images quickly enough to justify waiting around to earn 3 cents.
so the site is now closed down for "maintenance". someone somewhere needs to have a good think. at the size and load speed of the images, even when the site is at full speed, i estimate you can earn 3 dollars an hour, tops, maybe. who will want to do that?
only people in asia, i should think, another outsourcing.
2. Alan Hatcher
So far most of us Turkers, as we call ourselves, are enjoying doing the work on Mechanical Turk. There are problems, but Amazon has clearly labeled this as an application that is in Beta Testing and they are making regular changes to improve it. A small online community of regular submitters on MTurk has already begun forming. Check out mturkey.blogspot.com for my daily observations about it.