Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk

[Aristos Queue]

Amazon.com has started a very cool site:

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

The basic idea is to use human intelligence to augment artificial intelligence. So a search query comes in "find the cheapest pizza joint along the path from my house to home that does carryout". There's no one database to check for this information -- google maps might find all the pizza places, but comparing prices and whether they do carryout requires visiting the pizza restaurant sites. But a human being behind the scenes could answer this question. So Amazon.com has established a brokering system so that you can post a question, for a price, and another person can answer it, and get paid for doing so.

The interesting use of this is in beating CAPTCHAs -- a spammer that faces one of those "type in the word you see in this image" that is supposed to block robots can automate the posting of a question to the Amazon.com site and then posting the human's answer back to the original website, thus giving the robot the ability to get past the CAPTCHA. It costs a bit of money, but for some activities (online polls, marketing buzz, etc) there would be financial gain for doing the post, so it may be viable.

[Yair]

QUOTE

How do you improve artificial intelligence? Take away the artificialit

And then call it Artificial Artificial Intelligence and hope that people don't notice. :laugh:

[LAVA 1.0 Content]

I thought about this when I learned about Mechanical Turk some time ago. I looked at the types of HITs available today and saw mostly transcription of podcasts. There is this one guy $teve $tedman that has a blog called blogging for money. He has a collection of lame blogs that match popular Google keywords (dating, beer,hybrid car), includes lots of ads and then pays people a penny or two using mturk to leave a comment. He'll pay you a bit more if you write an article.

Ugh...

[eaolson]

Most of the rewards are in the 2-5 cent range, it seems. At minimum wage, 10 seconds of your time is worth about 1.5 cents. Most of these look like they would take significantly longer than that.