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November 4, 2005
Innovation from Amazon
Captcha (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) are those annoying and disabled unfriendly distorted pictures of text that websites use make you prove that you are not a shell script running on a zombie computer. This hinges upon the fact that most humans are very good at amplifying and operating signal from noise, and so the symbols of language stand out for us in a way that is very difficult for machine to emulate.
Amazon has flipped this idea on its head. They are going to pay you a few cents to identify facts about images that are easy for humans to discern but difficult for machines to do so. Like is this man holding a can of coke? Is their pizza in this picture? This service, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, is named after a famous machine from the 1700's that purported to play masterful chess. Instead of the elaborate mechanism that appeared to play chess, it turned out to be a combination of puppetry and a hidden chess grandmaster.
Yardly points out how this is a great way to cut out the middle man on outsourcing. If true, expect it to be like Google answers, where the response was so tremendous that the price rapidly got bid down.
Labnotes points out the similarity to what spammers are already doing.
Kudos to Maunder for being the first to blog about it, and noticing how this will be useful for organizing the A9 search engine images.
Slashdot has a discussion.
Posted by OneEyedMan at November 4, 2005 12:51 PM
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