Got Mturk?

One of the coolest websites I ever discovered (by way of a magazine) is Amazon's Mturk. Mturk is short for Mechanical Turk, a reference to the original Mechanical Turk, which, as Wikipedia puts it, "was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854, it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was explained in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa, the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, as well as perform the knight's tour, a puzzle that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard exactly once.

The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. With a skilled operator, the Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for nearly 84 years, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Although many had suspected the hidden human operator, the hoax was initially revealed only in the 1820s by the Londoner Robert Willis."

The basic idea behind Mturk is that, advanced as computers are, there are still some things they aren't capable of. If you show a computer two pictures, one of a barbershop, and the other of an ice cream shop, odds are it wont' be able to identify which is which. But a human can do it pretty easily. So, much like the Mechanical Turk of old, a human takes the place of a machine and completes tasks which are impossible for today's computers.

A computer can't identify competition for Pizza My Ass, but YOU can!

This is great for everyone, since people who need pictures identified or whatnot can get them identified, and people with too much time on their hands can get paid to identify pictures of stuff (or whatever else needs to get done). Payments can range from one cent to several dollars per HIT (human intelligence task).

I've been a member over at Mturk for a few years, and in total I've made over $100. It's not a lot for the amount of time, but I often find I can do a few jobs while I'm surfing the internet (or blogging) and it doesn't take up any more of my time then I'm already wasting online anyways.

If you're interested in giving it a try and making a couple cents, then head over to mturk.com. And for the record, I'm not getting paid or compensated in any way for linking to them. I just really like what it offers and like to spread the word about cool stuff.