
Soylent: A Word Processor With A Crowd Inside - MaysonL
http://code.google.com/p/soylent/
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MaysonL
See also Bruce Sterling's take on it (with a video of it in action):
[http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/09/soylent-a-
wor...](http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/09/soylent-a-word-
processor-with-a-crowd-inside/)

~~~
nezumi
The scariest thing about that video is how easily they refer to Soylent as
'it', as in 'it cuts down your text', 'it fixes grammar errors', even though
when Soylent is in use it's clearly a 'they'. Or perhaps that distinction is
as nonsensical as referring to the bundle of neurons in your head as 'they'...

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aidenn0
Remember in the 80s how AI was going to allow computers to do all sorts of
things that only humans could do well?

Just a few decades down the line, and now computers can get humans to do all
sorts of things that only humans can do well.

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shiftb
Soylent Green is made of People[1]! At the very least it's a clever name.

Really smart, interesting concept. I'm not sure I trust other random people to
correct my grammar though.

[1] Thanks to Mr. Kenuda, 11th Grade Physics teacher, who convinced me to
watch that movie.

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motters
On one level it's quite cool to see human intelligence pipelined as a service,
but on another I worry that this may represent a new form of slavery with the
turkers being paid at such a low level that other social problems may arise as
a consequence.

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akozak
While I'm sympathetic to this worry about crowdsourcing (which Jonathan
Zittrain has been writing and speaking about for years), I'm still optimistic
that the architecture of ecosystems like Mechanical Turk can protect people
from exploitation. And hopefully the market will set fair compensation per
task (although I don't think it has yet).

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scottyallen
This would be really useful for programming, particularly refactoring. Imagine
being able to quickly apply a relatively mechanical refactoring that still
required human judgement (pretty common), and have other programmers do it for
you.

I imagine it would work something like this:

\- Select the files/directories/blocks of code that you want the refactoring
applied to.

\- Describe (in english) what the refactoring work should be, and do an
example on one piece of the code.

\- The work gets split (by file?) and distributed via a mechanical turk-like
interface (extra points if it opens tasks in your favorite editor with syntax
highlighting). As workers submit their work, the code is automatically built
and tests are run (could be a callback to your local development environment,
so you don't have to worry about shipping all your code up to the cloud and
figuring out how to build it there).

Could be pretty awesome, particularly if you could enlist an army of freshman
CS majors, bored programmers, and eager overseas engineers. I wonder if
intellectual property concerns would be too high for people to actually use it
though.

EDIT: If I still worked at Google, this would be a fun project to try
internally as 20% project. There are lots of mechanical refactoring tasks that
need to be done across large portions of the codebase, good build/test
infrastructure to easily verify success/failure for a given task, and lots of
bored/eager engineers that feed off of reward-based systems:)

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RK
Here's my human macro for all you high school/college students:

"Expand these bullet points into a 5 page paper"

Even though it mentions things that are along the lines of correction, this
could pretty easily be moved into the realm of crowd-sourced cheating.

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wtracy
I guess you need to be careful not to use this on any confidential documents.

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aberkowitz
I wonder if shortn could be used to turn regular Wikipedia articles into those
fitting of simple Wikipedia[1].

[1] <http://simple.wikipedia.org>

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Groxx
Mechanical Turk has been the brute-force behind a lot of unique concepts, it
seems. Really cool use of crowd-sourcing, and you've gotta love the name.
"Soylent is people" indeed.

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mitko
wow! At 4pm today I was giving a talk in my lab about how cool this work is.

What really impresses though is not that it works. It is the Find-Fix-Verify
design pattern which tries to set some good practices in crowd-sourcing. For
example in GUI/web engineering MVC is considered good practice.

Refference: Bernstein, M.S., Little, G., Miller, R.C. et al. Soylent: A Word
Processor with a Crowd Inside. UIST '10, ACM Press (2010)

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collint
Heck, I want this in my hacking. Grep for all the TODO/FIXME and run it
through MTURK....

hmmm

Might work better if you write a test for the code.

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byoung2
This would be very useful as a Wordpress plugin.

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aberkowitz
It would be amusing [and expensive] if it was enabled for comments.

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Luyt
Soylent is made of People!

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yters
So will there be a programming language with human powered functions?

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john_horton
In some sense, this is what TurKit already is:

<http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/turkit/>

And I think TurKit is part of the back-end for Soylent.

