At the end of last month, the USPTO awarded patent #7197459 titled “Hybrid machine/human computing arrangement”. Now you are thinking.. what a strange patent title….who would come up with something like that… well guess who those inventors were? Thats right folks.. while they were busy at Amazon, our founders Venkat Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman (with Anand Ranganathan) invented the Mechanical Turk!

In brief, Mechanical Turk is a means for humans and computers to collaborate on accomplishing tasks. Say you had some task that required human judgment and intelligence like “What is your opinion of the summaries of these 10 news articles”. You would then set up a number of HITs (human intelligence task) using mechanical turk. The turk would then make these tasks available to human users who have signed up. When the humans complete the task they can upload their results and get compensation for the number of tasks they completed. You get to review their submissions and authorize payment to them.

The Turk system shields you from the details of the users and for all you know its like a giant computer accomplishing your task!! Pretty cool huh!! There you go.. yet another smart idea from our founders!!