Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

The NYT had an interesting article in that it shows what we could be doing properly using Web 2.0 resources. The current term for this is crowd sourcing.

Jeff Bezos, who we all know as the founder of Amazon.com created “Amazon Mechanical Turk”. This is an online service Amazon uses to weed out duplicate pages. The Mechanical Turk has people look for duplicate pages and pays a few cents to each duplicate page correctly identified by the user.

ChaCha pays about 30,000 users as much as $10/hour to guide web users to relevant search results.

We are beginning to see some useful things come from crowd sourcing. Where better to find open sourced photos when you need them than flickr? Yahoo news has a popular option where you can read the stories most other people are reading. StumbleUpon almost always serves up good results. Wiki has been very successful at setting up an online encyclopedia.

Sometimes it doesn’t quite work. While Digg is fun and has some great stories make the front page quite a bit of junk gets in as well. And they had a revolt they had to put down not long ago.

All of you reading this know what can be done with simple ants and ant algorithms. Imagine instead of ants we use people.

More information:
Artificial Intelligence With Help From the Humans NYT
The Rise of Crowdsourcing Wired
Amazon Mechanical Turk
ChaCha
The Mechanical Turk
The Newest AI Computing Tool: People