High speed super clusters feverishly burning around the clock, relentlessly working at a painsakingly designed, yet unbelievably elegant image processing algorithm? Nah, just pay a 15 year old 3 cents to do it in 30 seconds.

Amazon has a soon to be released service called the “Mechanical Turk.” The name comes from the chess machine built in the 18th century that soundly beat almost every opponent it played, when in fact it was an apparently very small chessmaster, cleverly concealed.

The idea is that while computers are amazing at doing many things, there are still a number of tasks, often in the computer vision field, that are trivial for a person, but very difficult to solve algorithmically. For example,

Find the store most likely to sell me a cup of coffee in this photo of a strip mall.

Enter Mechanical Turk.

Turk is a web-api’d service that allows you to post Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) and corresponding answers. The idea is that you make relatively nothing, a few cents, for one answer, but they take little to no time and can accumulate quickly.

Obviously, there are numerous super cool possibilities with a service like this, but I’d like to start simple .. so my first HIT, valued at 15 cents, is:

Can you or can you not, based on this photo, train a male Carolina Wren to do your dishes?