Tech Bloggers Discuss Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Posted on November 4, 2005

Bloggers are discussing Amazon.com's latest service called Amazon Mechanical Turk. The service is named after a famous hoax pulled by Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen. Kemeplen fooled people with a contraption called the the Turk that was supposed to be a mechanical chess-playing automaton but actually contained a chess expert inside.

The Turk was a wooden cabinet on wheels, atop which sat a chessboard and a life-sized wooden mannequin dressed in Turkish style. This mysterious contraption would play against, and often defeat, human opponents. In truth the Turk was a clever illusion: the cabinet concealed a human chess expert who moved the Turk's arm and played the games.

Amazon.com's service allows companies to assign simple tasks that can be completed by people with Internet access in exchange for some micropayments to their Amazon.com account. Amazon.com is already using the service itself to improve their A9 yellow page service. They ask people to select from several photographs the one that best presents the front of a business. Amazon.com will take a 10% commission on each completed task -- which are also known as Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs.

There are no up-front fees to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service. Instead, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects a 10% commission on top of the amount you (the "Requester") have paid someone to complete your Human Intelligence Tasks ("HITs"). The minimum commission charge is $0.005 per HIT.

The service has already been Slashdotted and "Mechanical Turk" is now the #1 search on Technorati. Technorati shows just 125 posts so far but there will be many more by Monday morning.