This website is quite bizarre on first glance. It doesn’t do much better on second or third glance either, but it’s intended as a demonstration of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online service, which offers an interesting model for humans to accomplish tasks that computers aren’t good at. The system allows requesters to upload tasks, which human users then complete in return for a small payment (usually just a few cents each). The Wikipedia article has more details.
Despite the intriguing premise the service seems to not have caught on since its introduction last November, with new task postings slowing to a trickle. Part of the problem seems to be that most of the tasks don’t pay very well relative to the amount of time it takes to complete them. Another possible cause for the slowdown is that Amazon seems to have thought up the system as a way to cheaply accomplish mundane cleanup tasks on their database, which would have been much more expensive for them to take care of in house. It seems likely that Amazon’s stock of cleanup tasks eventually dried up, leaving users with relatively little to do, since few other companies seem interested in using the service for similar cleanup duties.
On the other hand, Amazon seems to be busy thinking up new uses for the service, as indicated by multiple posts on the subject on Amazon Web Services’ blog.
As a sidenote, the service’s name refers to a famous 18th century hoax in which a chess playing “mechanical automaton” known as “The Turk” toured Europe, in the process playing (and beating) many notables of the day. Only later was it revealed that the device was actually run by a cleverly concealed operator in the compartment below, hence Amazon’s adoption of the name for their service which coordinates computational tasks with human intelligence.
UPDATE: This post discusses MTurk and several of Amazon’s other recent tech initiatives.
the sheep thing’s not a “demonstration” of the Mechanical Turk, it’s just an art project that happens to use it. The Sheep Market has no affilliation with Amazon at all.
I guess “demonstration” was a poor choice of words.
I didn’t mean to imply that it was affiliated with Amazon at all, and frankly I have no idea who is responsible for the Sheep Market or why.