Solving Instagram's Unshredder with Mechanical Turk and $0.50

The next step: turn it into a game and get it done for free. Even better, put a skinnerian ux around it and <i>charge</i> for the pleasure of solving picture puzzles ;)

Another possible way to do this is present the Turker with two vertical pieces already placed together. Ask them a yes/no question: do these two images match?<p>Iterate intelligently over your favorite sorting algorithm until you've placed all the images!<p>Note: requires more Turkers but each answer could be worth much less, maybe around $0.01

Am I the only person who doesn't see this as Instagram's unshredding project as much as a DARPA one?<p><a href="http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/darpa-wants-puzzle-solvers-reconstruct-shredded-documents" rel="nofollow">http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-10/darpa-wants...</a>

This is a really neat hack but How does the script know whether or not the solution was correct? Have they shared a real solution that solves this problem completley algorithmically, without human involvement? I could not find it.

This is probably the first time I've ever cares about "crowdsourcing" or his ugly brother-in-law, "cloudsourcing". However, I can't help but imagine why they want a solution for this. Seems like Cold Wat-era spook stuff.

I can imagine it now, this is the first step in human evolutionary divergence between the Eloi (programmers) and the Morlocks (Mechanical Turkers).

The jQuery sorter thingy is incredibly buggy / slow. I would have been done in 1/3rd of the time if it wasn't!

If more turk tasks were like this one, I'd probably consider putting some free time into it. That was actually sort of fun.

This is just brilliantly simple and effective. The fact that you created a fully functional prototype is just gravy.

OT: For some reason the Recollect bar that slides in from the top when I scroll down the page is <i>very</i> distracting. It seems to violate the expectation that, when scrolling downward, page content should only be moving upward. It also feels like it's robbing me of readable screen area. I suspect I'd be much less bothered by a <i>position: fixed</i> header that was always present.

This is a very cool way to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk!<p>I am 99% sure that the image (at least the one that I saw) on the page is of Tokyo's Shibuya station. And the tall white and black building on the right 1/3 of the picture? That's the Cross Tower building, housing Amazon's Tokyo office.<p>This photo had to have been taken from one of the upper floors of the Cerulean Tower hotel.

Very clever sir! I've used the Mechanical Turk for a couple of interesting tasks, lowering prices to $0.01 and having Turkers complete those tasks in less than 2 minutes which is pretty awesome! It's very interesting how we've started to create some kind of relationship with Turkers, since we've sent over 1M HITs since we started using it.

Love it. This is an excellent use of mechanical turk solving real world problems.

Very cool. I'd love to see the jQuery you used for this. Is that posted anywhere?

Wow. That is truly amazing. Creative work my friend.