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| - :This article is about the Amazon web service. For its chess-playing namesake, see The Turk.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is one of the suite of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Requesters, the human beings that write these programs, are able to pose tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. To place HITs, the requesting programs use an open Application Programming Interface, or the somewhat limited Mturk Requester site.
Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, a Requester has to have a U.S. address, but Workers can be anywhere in the world. Payments for completing tasks can be redeemed on Amazon.com via gift certificate or be later transferred to a Worker's U.S. bank account. Requesters, which are typically corporations, pay 10 percent of the price of successfully completed HITs (or more for extremely cheap HITs) to Amazon.
The service was launched publicly on November 2, 2005, and is currently in beta. Following its launch, Mechanical Turk user base grew quickly, in part the result of the Slashdot effect. At that time there were a huge number of "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs) in the system. In early to mid November, 2005, there were tens of thousands of HITs, all of them uploaded to the system by Amazon itself for some of its internal tasks that required human intelligence. Web traffic grew to a massive amount near the beginning of December 2005. Since then, the number of HITs in the system has decreased, and by December 20, 2005 there were less than 100 groups of HITs on the average page load. By January, new types of HITs were set up, such as selecting the three best restaurants in a city, and third party HITs began to appear as well. As of April 2006, there were only the occasional batch of 25 HIT groups being offered, and the service had slowed to a crawl. As of January 2007 there were new HITS being offered of podcast transcribing and rating and image tagging (which is becoming very popular). The transcription HITs are mostly posted by CastingWords. Other common HIT types ask 'Turkers' to write or rewrite sentences, paragraphs, or whole articles. HITs which reward people for linking to or commenting on a blog, or friending a person on Facebook are also often encountered In March 2007 there were reportedly more than 100,000 workers in over 100 countries. (en)
- Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is een website van Amazon, waarbij taken door mensen worden uitgevoerd.
Op de website komen aanvragers van taken en mensen die het uitvoeren bij elkaar. Met veel taken kan geld verdiend worden.
De naam Mechanical Turk is afkomstig van de mechanische Turk-schaakmachine. Dit werd gepresenteerd als een mechanische machine die kon schaken, terwijl er in werkelijkheid een goede schaker in de machine verborgen zat. In september 2007 werd de Amazon Mechanical Turk ingezet bij de zoektocht naar Steve Fossett. (nl)
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