Amazon.com is synonymous with easy navigation, choice and an attitude to customer service that puts most other retailers to shame. However, do some random Googling and there are rumblings of discontent from both, in Mechanical Turk’s language, the requesters (program developers) and the providers (workers)?
The Beginnings of Mechanical Turk
The name originates from an 18th century machine that not only played chess, but played well enough to beat its human opponents. Of course, it was a hoax, as inside the machine was a human chess master. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was originally developed as an in-house tool to test information for consistency using humans rather than computers, as computers are unable to perform some tasks as well as humans.
Amazon were so enthralled with the results they saw a niche for the application in other business areas and Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing platform was launched to the wider world in November 2006. So, now it is used by program developers to put up jobs, or HITS (Human Intelligence Tasks), and workers accept the HITS, complete them, return them to the developer and await payment.
