

Ask HN: What is the coolest thing someone has done with Amazon Mechanical Turk? - oseibonsu


======
SlightGenius
<http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/jbigham/vizwiz/video/>

"Another cool creation adding human intelligence to software is VizWiz which
aids vision-impaired individuals answer visual environment oriented questions
such as who sent you the letter, and distinguish various items in your pantry.
Some of these questions are answered as quick as 59 seconds. " - Taken from
[http://www.trendecommerce.com/experiment-post-amazon-
mechani...](http://www.trendecommerce.com/experiment-post-amazon-mechanical-
turk-mturk-the-human-intelligence-task-requester/)

------
earle
The search for Steve Fossett!

<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/11/fossett_search>

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SatvikBeri
Machine Learning Algorithms require a lot of training data. For example, say
you want to create a program separating pictures of cars by manufacturer. To
train the algorithm, you might need a few thousand pictures that are
classified as Hondas, Toyotas, etc. This is easy but cumbersome for humans to
do.

The point is, we use Amazon Mechanical Turk to create training sets for
Machine Learning algorithms, which I always find really interesting and
clever.

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sgaither
Creating a $100 bill

<http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html>

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ElectricPenguin
Solving Instagram’s Unshredder with Mechanical Turk and $0.50

This was more of a proof of concept but was pretty impressive.
[http://code.recollect.com/post/13372390010/mechanical-
turk-u...](http://code.recollect.com/post/13372390010/mechanical-turk-
unshredder)

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scottyallen
I experimented with having turkers grade elementary school math quizzes. The
idea was that teachers would scan in their all their quizzes/tests/homework to
be graded along with the answer key, and turkers would grade according to the
key. It worked, but the margins weren't there.

------
ohashi
I liked <http://www.FeedbackArmy.com>

------
SlightGenius
I also had this bookmarked
[http://glenmcgregor.tumblr.com/post/1167624539/mechanical-
tu...](http://glenmcgregor.tumblr.com/post/1167624539/mechanical-turk-vs-the-
eqao)

