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The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the somewhat limited Mturk Requester site. Amazon Web Services logo The Amazon Web Services (AWS) are a collection of remote computing services (also called web services) offered over the Internet by Amazon. ...
Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. ...
API and Api redirect here. ...
Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, a Requester has to have a U.S. address, but Workers can be anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically corporations, pay 10 percent of the price of successfully competed HITs (or more for extremely cheap HITs) to Amazon.[1] Scrip is any substitute for currency, which is not legal tender. ...
About the name
The name Mechanical Turk comes from "The Turk", a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It toured Europe beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin, but turned out not to really be an automaton at all: a chess master hid in a special compartment controlling its operations. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk web service allows humans to help the machines of today to perform tasks they aren't yet suited for. An engraving of the Turk from Karl Gottlieb von Windischs 1784 book Inanimate Reason The Turk was a famous hoax that purported to be a chess-playing machine. ...
An automaton (plural: automata) is a self-operating machine. ...
(17th century - 18th century - 19th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800. ...
Wolfgang von (de Pámánd) Kempelen or Ján Vlk Kempelen or Farkas Kempelen (born 23 January 1734 in Pressburg (today Bratislava), died 26 March 1804 in Vienna) was an author and inventor, who became most famous for his construction of the Mechanical Turk, which was a first-class...
Bonaparte as general Napoleon Bonaparte ( 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) was a general of the French Revolution and was the ruler of France as First Consul (Premier Consul) of the French Republic from November 11, 1799 to May 18, 1804, then as Emperor of the French (Empereur des...
Benjamin Franklin (January 17 [O.S. January 6] 1706 – April 17, 1790) was one of the most well known Founding Fathers of the United States. ...
The verb "to turk" has a strong negative connotation in German, meaning "to fake", and is considered politically incorrect. The service is currently only marketed in the U.S., so this has not yet posed a problem for Amazon.
History of the service The service was initially invented for Amazon's in-house use, to find duplicates among its web pages describing products.[1]
The service was launched publicly on November 2, 2005, and is currently in beta. Following its launch, Mechanical Turk user base grew quickly, in part the result of the Slashdot effect. At that time there were a huge number of "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs) in the system. In early to mid November, 2005, there were tens of thousands of HITs, all of them uploaded to the system by Amazon itself for some of its internal tasks that required human intelligence. Web traffic grew to a massive amount near the beginning of December 2005. Since then, the number of HITs in the system has decreased, and by December 20, 2005 there were less than 100 groups of HITs on the average page load. By January, new types of HITs were set up, such as selecting the three best restaurants in a city, and third party HITs began to appear as well. As of April 2006, there were only the occasional batch of 25 HIT groups being offered, and the service had slowed to a crawl. As of January 2007 there were new HITS being offered of podcast transcribing and rating and image tagging (which is becoming very popular). In March 2007 there were reportedly more than 100,000 workers in over 100 countries.[1] is the 306th day of the year (307th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The Slashdot effect is the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic. ...
Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
is the 354th day of the year (355th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
In September 2007 the Mechanical Turk was used in the search for aviator Steve Fossett. Satellite data from Digital Globe and other providers was streamed to users of the Mechanical Turk in 85 square metre sections; users were asked to examine each image for 'foreign' objects that might be an aircraft, aircraft remains, signs of a crash, or other anomalous items.[1] James Stephen Fossett (born April 22, 1944) is an American aviator, sailor and adventurer known for his appetite to set world records. ...
Third party programming Programmers have developed various browser extensions and scripts designed to simplify the process of completing HITs. According to the Amazon Web Services Blog, however, Amazon appears to disapprove of the ones that automate the process 100% and take out the human element. Accounts using so-called automated bots have been banned. Scripting languages (commonly called scripting programming languages or script languages) are computer programming languages that are typically interpreted and can be typed directly from a keyboard. ...
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Related systems -
MTurk is comparable in some respects to the now discontinued Google Answers service. However, the mechanical Turk is a more general marketplace that can potentially help distribute any kind of work tasks all over the world. The Collaborative Human Interpreter by Philipp Lenssen also suggested using distributed human intelligence to help computer programs perform tasks that computers cannot do well. MTurk could be used as the execution engine for the CHI. Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. ...
Google Answers was a knowledge market offered by Google that allowed users to post bounties for well researched answers to their queries. ...
A marketplace is the space, actual or metaphorical, in which a market operates. ...
Please wikify (format) this article as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. ...
Criticism Because HITs are typically simple, repetitive tasks and users are paid often only a few cents to complete them, some have criticized Mechanical Turk as a "virtual sweatshop." Workers have no recourse if companies refuse to pay them for good work. Requesters do not have to file tax forms, and avoid minimum wage, overtime, and workers compensation laws. Workers, though, must report their income as highly-taxed self-employment income. However, at least some workers on Mechanical Turk are people who are middle class and do the work to end boredom or for fun.[2]
References - ^ a b c Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans, The New York Times, 25 March 2007
- ^ I make $1.45 a week and I love it Salon.com. July 24, 2006.
Salon. ...
is the 205th day of the year (206th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
External links - Official website
- Wired Magazine story about 'Crowdsourcing' June, 2006
- Business Week Article on Mechanical Turk
- New York Times Article on Mechanical Turk
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