Friday, July 21, 2006

Amazon Mechanical Turk

I'm still not entirely sure what to think about Amazon's new beta service entitled Mechanical Turk, labeled as Artificial Artificial Intelligence. The concept is WAY out there. Basically they realize that humans are actually better than computers at doing certain tasks. They use the example of a human finding an object in a picture before they can even talk. The provide it as a observing with an API you submit a request and a human processes it. Its not instant, in fact it might take a long time. Why? Well because the humans in the Turk are you, me, or anyone with a connection to the internet. That's right anyone of us right now has the option to be in the Turk but seeming as how a quick google search turned up few results I am not sure how many people are in the Turk. I doubt anyone will get rich being a Human in the Turk but it can provide some fun, if worse comes to worse it might provide for a burger or 2 when you're in college, or allow a board house wife (or husband) to make a few bucks to buy some trinkets here and there. I'll definitely post more about this webservice as I play around with it more.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, it's been a while. Have you played around with it? Please tell us your experience.