Mechanical Turk
Submitted by bruce on Fri, 2008-06-20 11:46.
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Amazon.com has a service called Mechanical Turk which allows businesses to outsource computer work to people all over the world. The service is named after a Hungarian nobleman, Wolfgang von Kempelen, who astonished Europe in 1769 by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. With the Amazon service, a job is broken up into HITs or Human Intelligence Tasks. A HIT is a task which requires a person to do, such as reviewing grammar in a document or identifying an object in a picture. This is a very interesting business model.
