Why Am I Just Hearing About This?

Mechanical Turk is a service offered by Amazon for fulfilling HITs or Human Intelligence Tasks. These assignments skirt the void between AI and regular expressions. They are basically grunt work.

You specify a task, give fairly rigid parameters and specify how many workers you want to answer each question (for validation). My brain has sort of seized up thinking about this.

From waxy.org

Instead, I decided to use human labor to fill in the gaps using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I created a new request using the new web-based tools for generating HITs (or “Human Intelligence Tasks”) from a simple spreadsheet.

I paid $0.02 for each request, with each song verified by two different workers. Each worker was asked to search for the song on Billboard.com, All Music Guide, Wikipedia, or Google, and fill in the original release year. Here’s an example of one of the requests.

…yadda yadda yadda…

Overall, it cost me $13.20 for all 528 answers and took a little over two hours, an hourly rate of about $1.64. Simple to use, affordable, and I’ll almost certainly use it again — for something a little more interesting next time.