andygates

This was going to be another Aint-It-Cool post about Amazon's Mechanical Turk, until the story took an unexpected twist.

The Mechanical Turk is an attempt at providing an artificial AI service.  Named after the chess-playing automaton which had a real human chess-player, the Mechanical Turk provides an API (programming interface) so you can submit code to it, but under the hood there are real human beings.  It's intended for problems which are easy for you and me but fiendishly hard for a computer, like "is there a frog in this photo" or "summarise the plot of Tomb Raider".

A person working for the Turk sets up an account and accepts or rejects jobs from the Big List O' Jobs.  Jobs typically pay a few cents, so with plenty of clicky you can earn decent pocket money.  The whole idea is pretty damn cool - just think of the stuff you could do with a human-grade AI at the end of a function call.  Think of it as distributed processing - SETI@home style - with very clever but very slow AI processors.  You too can be a node.

And then Turing Award-winning ubergeek Jim Gray disappeared while sailing.  He hasn't turned up yet, and probably won't.  But he seems to have been well-liked.  Geeks flock to their own like any subculture and leveraged some satellite time to do a high-res photo scan of the ocean where he is thought to have disappeared.  The images were diced up into little chunks and submitted as a job to the Turk: Is there a capsized boat in this photo?  Yes, no, or comment.  Trivial for you and me, tough for a computer, and too large for the Coastguard.  The Turk job was set up as a volunteer effort, so it doesn't pay anything, and it's an interesting example of people using a novel tool in an unexpected way.