Amazon and The Mechanical Turk
John's last entry about The Sheep Market left me wondering exactly what the Mechanical Turk was - I'd come across it in the past breifly but not paid too much attention.
Well, it turns out the the original Mechanical Turk was built in the late 17th Century and was a fake chess-playing machine. It was constructed in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen to impress the Empress Maria Theresa. Whilst the machine appeared to play a very strong game of chess, defeating most challengers, it in fact housed a human chess-master inside operating the machine!
During its 84 year life, it toured aroud Europe and the Americas, defeating both Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Its secret was finally found out and the machine relegated to a museum where it was destroyed by fire in 1854.
The name has now been coined by Amazon for its Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The MTurk harnesses the power of thousands of human workers Worldwide to peform tasks that cannot be performed automatically by a computer. Anybody can sign up to either perform tasks in return for small cash rewards (typically $0.02c - $10.00 for more complex tasks), or to pose tasks for workers to carry out. Typical tasks might be to identify the contents of a group of images, or to rewrite or translate documents.
In the case of The Sheep Market an artist called Aaron Koblin, posted a task on the Mturk which asked workers to draw him a sheep (facing to the left). Each worker was paid $0.02c for their drawing and he amassed 10,000 sheep images which he has now pulled into an art installation which is touring 5 galleries throughout the world.
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Breyer1
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