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Concept
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Summary
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon. Employers (known as requesters) post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the employer. To place jobs, the use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site. , Requesters could register from 49 approved countries.
The service was conceived by Venky Harinarayan in a U.S. patent disclosure in 2001. Amazon coined the term artificial artificial intelligence for processes that outsource some parts of a computer program to humans, for those tasks carried out much faster by humans than computers. It is claimed that Jeff Bezos was responsible for proposing the development of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to realize this process.
The name Mechanical Turk was inspired by "The Turk", an 18th-century chess-playing automaton made by Wolfgang von Kempelen that toured Europe, and beat both Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was later revealed that this "machine" was not an automaton, but a human chess master hidden in the cabinet beneath the board and controlling the movements of a humanoid dummy. Analogously, the Mechanical Turk online service uses remote human labor hidden behind a computer interface to help employers perform tasks that are not possible using a true machine.
MTurk launched publicly on November 2, 2005. Its user base grew quickly. In early- to mid-November 2005, there were tens of thousands of jobs, all uploaded to the system by Amazon itself for some of its internal tasks that required human intelligence.
Official source
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