Amazon has a new service called Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The Turk is a reference to a “mechanical chess-playing automaton” from 1769:

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen’s “Turk” was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet’s doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the mechanical Turk: a chess master cleverly concealed inside.

There is a great book I read about The Turk awhile ago called (what else) “The Turk“.

To break down what Amazon’s new service is:

• Lets say you had 10,000 photographs and you needed only photographs with dogs
• There is no computer that can do this reliability - so you need real people
• You then write a program that displays the images and says “Is there a dog in this image” “Yes or No”
• Using the Amazon Turk API you then can release the program on the web and pay people .05 per image
• Amazon handles all the backend stuff and you get reliable results - real people looking at each image, telling you which images have dogs (and getting a small compensation for their trouble)

Very interesting, something to keep your eye on…