
Solving Instagram's Unshredder with Mechanical Turk and $0.50 - bertrandom
http://code.recollect.com/post/13372390010/mechanical-turk-unshredder
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cellis
The next step: turn it into a game and get it done for free. Even better, put
a skinnerian ux around it and _charge_ for the pleasure of solving picture
puzzles ;)

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mikeknoop
Another possible way to do this is present the Turker with two vertical pieces
already placed together. Ask them a yes/no question: do these two images
match?

Iterate intelligently over your favorite sorting algorithm until you've placed
all the images!

Note: requires more Turkers but each answer could be worth much less, maybe
around $0.01

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aantix
Slightly offtopic, but I am the author of the Rails/Mechanical Turk
integration gem, Turkee ( <http://www.github.com/aantix/turkee> ).

The lower the cost of the HIT (and the easier the question) the more you want
to make sure you're screening for bots.

Make sure you have a gold standard question. For every HIT ask two questions;
ask the legitimate question that you need answered and then on top of that,
ask a simple "gold-standard" question that will determine whether the answer
submitted is a bot or not.

For the gold standard, I like to choose two numbers, and store the sum of
their values. Along with your HIT question, be sure to ask the Turker the
value of their sum.

E.g. For a survey you ask the Turker "What is your favorite color?" But then
along with that, you ask them "What is four plus fve?"

Be sure to misspell one value (e.g. remove a letter, etc). If the Turker
doesn't respond correctly to the "gold standard" question, programmatically
reject their response.

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pama
Not sure if this matters for a "gold standard" question, but google answers it
correctly:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=What+is+four+plus+fve%3F>

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rhizome
Am I the only person who doesn't see this as Instagram's unshredding project
as much as a DARPA one?

[http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/darpa-
wants...](http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/darpa-wants-puzzle-
solvers-reconstruct-shredded-documents)

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Omnipresent
This is a really neat hack but How does the script know whether or not the
solution was correct? Have they shared a real solution that solves this
problem completley algorithmically, without human involvement? I could not
find it.

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seanp2k2
This is probably the first time I've ever cares about "crowdsourcing" or his
ugly brother-in-law, "cloudsourcing". However, I can't help but imagine why
they want a solution for this. Seems like Cold Wat-era spook stuff.

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darkstar999
Would any of this help with producing a panorama? That's all I could think of.

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Groxx
Probably not, as then you have to play around with blending two images and
(un?)distorting them to match each other's shape. _That's_ the hard part -
people tend to take pictures in order rather than randomly.

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jarin
I can imagine it now, this is the first step in human evolutionary divergence
between the Eloi (programmers) and the Morlocks (Mechanical Turkers).

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shinratdr
That was strikingly similar to a comment I read just recently...

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jarin
If you're trying to imply that I "stole" the comment, I posted it in the
article comments _after_ posting it here (note the usernames). Figured it
might spark some discussion for people not coming from HN.

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shinratdr
I know that, I saw that it was you. I also don't have a problem with it, it
just caused me to do a double take and go check the site to see if my deja vu
was real. I thought I would mention that because I doubt I was the only one
who had that experience.

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lachyg
The jQuery sorter thingy is incredibly buggy / slow. I would have been done in
1/3rd of the time if it wasn't!

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burgerbrain
If more turk tasks were like this one, I'd probably consider putting some free
time into it. That was actually sort of fun.

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arkitaip
This is just brilliantly simple and effective. The fact that you created a
fully functional prototype is just gravy.

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nitrogen
OT: For some reason the Recollect bar that slides in from the top when I
scroll down the page is _very_ distracting. It seems to violate the
expectation that, when scrolling downward, page content should only be moving
upward. It also feels like it's robbing me of readable screen area. I suspect
I'd be much less bothered by a _position: fixed_ header that was always
present.

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jeffbarr
This is a very cool way to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk!

I am 99% sure that the image (at least the one that I saw) on the page is of
Tokyo's Shibuya station. And the tall white and black building on the right
1/3 of the picture? That's the Cross Tower building, housing Amazon's Tokyo
office.

This photo had to have been taken from one of the upper floors of the Cerulean
Tower hotel.

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jpadilla_
Very clever sir! I've used the Mechanical Turk for a couple of interesting
tasks, lowering prices to $0.01 and having Turkers complete those tasks in
less than 2 minutes which is pretty awesome! It's very interesting how we've
started to create some kind of relationship with Turkers, since we've sent
over 1M HITs since we started using it.

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iag
Love it. This is an excellent use of mechanical turk solving real world
problems.

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natch
Very cool. I'd love to see the jQuery you used for this. Is that posted
anywhere?

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jc4p
Just do a view-source on the unsolved version of this page:

<http://unshred.recollect.com>

It seems fairly simple for something that gives so much utility.

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code_duck
This is because the complexity is found in a library, jQuery UI, which
provides sortable().

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deepkut
Wow. That is truly amazing. Creative work my friend.

