Mechanical Turk

A few years ago, Amazon came out with a project called Mechanical Turk. It's a service by which people can engage the labor of others to do small tasks that computers are not very good at. For example, if you wanted to look up the addresses of certain companies on the web, it would be a very challenging task for a computer, but not that hard for a human. However, it would also not be that interesting, and you probably wouldn't expect to get a job looking up addresses full-time. Enter Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

This Spring, once I put up the initial version of the Garden and told a few friends about it, progress was a bit sluggish, to say the least. After all, real evolution takes place over millions of years and millions of organisms. Even dog-breeding takes many generations to start to see a new breed emerge. So, although I can sit at my computer and click a few hundred plants, not a whole lot of change occurs.

So, I decided to make use of the Mechanical Turk to jump-start my project. I thought of it as another art supply, really. Not that expensive, but not something you'd spend money on unless you needed to.

I created a half a dozen tasks on Amazon's site. Each one described my project briefly, asked workers to vote for at least 25 plants and paid out somewhere between 25 and 50 cents. Using the Mechanical Turk, I was able to generate over 10,000 new plants, and it didn't cost me much more than buying a few tubes of paint and a brush at the local art supply store.

Because I wanted my workers to have a more streamlined work-flow than what you see in the Garden proper, I developed a completely different interface. I called it the Voting Booth, and this is where I sent workers to vote for plants. Check it out if you're interested:

The Voting Booth

People who worked for the Garden, seemed to enjoy the work. After all, voting for odd, plant-like shapes, is not uninteresting work. In fact, many people got so into the task that they voted for many more plants than was required.

It's an intriguing service and one that I hope to use again. In the next version of the Garden, the old genetic code will no longer work, so I'll need to jump-start the next version with new plants. (I do plan to keep the old Garden around, but the new one will be much improved.)