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10,000 Mechanical Turkers work separately to draw a 100 dollar bill.
- boredguy8 18y agoYou can certainly see who the lazies are. Especially prominent: the "H" in "THIS", the "LE" in "LEGAL", part of the crest, and part of the seal. Guess the Mechanical Turk isn't good for, say, important data entry (without a system to set up cross-checks). Pretty cool, though.
- shafqat 18y agoI'm a huge fan of MT, and do think that it can be used to get pretty accurate/high quality results. You can actually have multiple people work on each HIT and then cross-check or chose the best I actually posted about our experience with MY yesterday here: http://blog.newscred.com/?p=157 http://blog.newscred.com/?p=157
- JulianMorrison 18y agoAn algorithm you could use: try three times, prefer the most similar two ("map"), look in those for puzzle-piece matches with the nearest neighbors ("reduce").
- serhei 18y agoIf you scroll down you can see that some people drew completely unrelated things. One guy doodled a stick figure. Another wrote "$0.01!! REALLY?!" The last guy did the drawing, then wrote "i hate u" over top.
- shafqat 18y agoThat kind of stuff is pretty rare. Turkers are pretty hard-working/honest people on the whole I guess out of 10,000 maybe 10-20 screwed around. That's less than .2%.
- timr 18y agoThey're certainly harder working than I'd be, given the amount of effort for the return.
- rudyfink 18y agoLooking at the bill, the number of bad cells seems far higher than you suggest. Some people didn't absolutely screw around but many did not finish the work. The percentage gets pretty bad in some of the high detail areas.
- serhei 18y agoObviously the dollar bill guys picked the worst ones because they wanted to make their point about crowdsourcing. Whatever that point might be. In any case, it's more interesting to stare at than just 8 well-done samples.
- danw 18y agoPaying $0.02 instead of $0.01 for a hit gets you faster response and better quality usually
- dcurtis 18y agoI wonder if you paid two people 1c and then merged the results, how accurate you'd be.
- danw 18y agoYou still wouldn't get the speed benefits that $0.02 offers. Some tasks (like this drawing one) can't be automatically verified. Anyone compared 2c and 1c with doublechecking for simpler tasks?
- jyothi 18y agohttp://www.tenthousandcents.com/gallery.html http://www.tenthousandcents.com/gallery.html This is the most interesting piece. You are seriously missing something if you are not checking this out. There are multiple sections - Detail (Mind blowing! - people putting in so much into this) Creativity - All the funny stuff Random art - hearts, texts and all that.
- andreyf 18y agoWhat kind of people think of stuff like this? Or more precisely - what kind of people think of stuff like this, sober up, and then actually implement it?
- alex_c 18y agoPeople who eventually end up doing something meaningful, because they're not afraid to try.
- timr 18y ago"Afraid" is not even close to the right word for this context. When I consider something like this, I don't think: "Oh, that's scary and/or challenging!" Instead, I think: "given all other possible uses of my time, is this one the best use possible?" Usually, the answer is no. For me, if there's any "meaning" in this project, it's in divining why someone would choose to begin (or participate in) this in the first place.
- alex_c 18y agoIf the question is "given all other possible uses of my time, is this one the best use possible?", then the answer will be "no" for almost any given value of "this". A likely result is doing nothing while one waits for the "perfect" thing to do - it might not apply as much to people on news.yc, but this does describe many people I know. If the question is "given all the ideas I have right now, and considering the effort to implement each, should I work on this?", the answer might be different.
- SCVirus 18y agoIn fact, it is impossible to determine the best possible use of your time without determining, without doubt, the meaning of life.
- run4yourlives 18y agoDid you ask yourself that before posting that comment? People have different interpretations of what they consider meaningful.
- astine 18y agoI've always been a little confused... Who's time is worth so little that they'd actually see a single cent worth doing one of these drawings? Kids? Third world laborers? I can see kids doing this, though I doubt that many would have access to the accounts and bank information necessary. As per third worlders: if a person's situation were such that a cent per minute was a reasonable wage, how could they afford a computer and an Internet connection? I'm imagining vast Chinese sweatshops with workers making .5 on the cent. Is my analysis wrong here?
- sdfx 18y agoI guess for most people it's not the money, but the feeling of accomplishment and the sense of community - teaming up to achieve a bigger goal. I doubt that sweatshops would do this - they are busy breaking captchas and mining gold in WoW.
- astine 18y agoExcept, how do you know what the bigger goals are? I signed up for MT a while ago thinking I should give it a shot to see what it was like. I had no idea what the tasks added up to on a grander scale and I found that it really wasn't worth my time. Edit: Are you sure that folks don't use MT to break captchas?
- sdfx 18y agoa salon.com article about the motivation of turkers has been posted here not to long ago: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/ http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/ It's certainly nothing for me, but it somehow attracts a lot of people. Is there something about breaking captchas in their terms of service?
- run4yourlives 18y agoFTA: Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing firm, has used Mturk.com to accomplish tens of thousands of tasks since early 2006. Efficient Frontier helps companies figure out which keywords will bring Web surfers to their sites. With Mturk.com, Efficient Frontier can afford to pay three different people to look at each potential keyword, and vote whether those words are relevant to a given site. It costs the company just 4.5 cents to test each keyword, paying 1.5 cents to Amazon, and 1 cent each to three turkers. That is sheer genius.
- sdfx 18y agoWhat really baffles me is the number of people that start out with the foreground and then destroy most of their work by slowly filling in the background. No wonder that it took them 5 month. Great project though and a nice demonstration of what can be done with mechanical turk.
- colortone 18y agothis is the same idea as the 10,000 sheep art project, done by the same guy, aaron koblin whee
- jkent 18y agoIsn't it illegal to sell life-sized colour prints of a $100 bill? Quality aside...
- felipe 18y agoWith a single print ($100) they recovered the costs of the entire labor ($100, or 10,000 cents). This is a great metaphor of our modern production chain, isn't it? (i. e.: How production exploits cheap labor)
- kirse 18y agoWhat metaphor would we use to explain the guy who did this on our production line? http://imagesocket.com/view/lol100b69.PNG http://imagesocket.com/view/lol100b69.PNG
- byrneseyeview 18y agoI'm pretty sure the average Mechanical Turk user could have scraped together $100, if they'd thought of it. If you're going to talk about Big Capitalism exploiting the cowering, puny forces of labor, you might want to pick a business where the startup cost is in the low three figures.
- floozyspeak 18y agoI think its funny that folks feel this stuff is so baffling. It think what's causing this alarming "HEY" in people is the price. Understandable really, who the hell wants to do anything for .02 cents. Yet, again, we got blinders on. That's not .02 cents an hour, time really isn't defined, either is real effort, or care and quality of effort. We just jump to the obvious answer in our heads without thinking about why, why WOULD someone do this. Why do people participate in social media? Why does the average teen check their myspace page 17 times a day? Who's getting paid to make 2.0 such an interesting place, well we sure aren't. Yet in turk land, the name of the game isn't to wake up and get excited about doing a .02 cent task. Its how fast can I do that so it doesn't feel like I did a .02 cent task. I'm bored, watching tv, why not make a few cents. Crazy, I know, yet, again, hello people are doing it. Then we jump into the next assumption, well most of these folks have to be indian or chinese. Gold farmers sleeping in cots, that's it, thats gotta be it. Feel better? Wrong, 80% of these turks are not chinese gold farmers. They average joes here in the states buying milk and bacon just like you do. SHOCKING! The sad thing is we hone in on all the .02 cent stories in turk, and yes there are plenty of them. But most turks I believe endure that cent crap to get to bigger fish. The "it took me less than 30 seconds for a buck" HITS, and I did 50 of those today. Now the money isn't so bad. For people requesting the work, paying some 2 cents is a great way to get crap data, good luck with that. Course at a large volume of stuff, maybe you don't care, but in general turks don't do 2 cent tasks for 2 cents, they do it cause they are bored, multi-tasking, its interesting or fun- drawing 100 bill rather interesting, or cause its fast as hell to do.
- jacobbijani 18y agoThis isn't exactly new. It was also one of the first projects like this done with Turk (ie, an art project and not just menial data entry).