Collaborative human interpreter

The collaborative human interpreter (CHI) is a proposed software interface for human-based computation (first proposed as a programming language on the blog Google Blogoscoped, but implementable via an API in virtually any programming language) specially designed for collecting and making use of human intelligence in a computer program. One typical usage is implementing impossible-to-automate functions.

For example, it is currently difficult for a computer to differentiate between images of men, women and non-humans. However, this is easy for people. A programmer using CHI could write a code fragment along these lines:

enum GenderCode {
MALE, FEMALE, NOT_A_HUMAN

Photo photo = loadPhoto(file)
GenderCode result = checkGender(photo)

Code for the function `checkGender(Photo p)` can currently only approximate a result, but the task can easily be solved by a person. When the function `checkGender()` is called, the system will send a request to someone, and the person who received the request will process the task and input the result. If the person (task processor) inputs value `MALE`, you'll get the value in your variable result, in your program. This querying process can be highly automated.

## Deployment

[edit]

On November 6, 2005, Amazon.com launched CHI as its business platform in the Amazon Mechanical Turk.[1] It's the first business application using CHI.

## Origins

[edit]

CHI is originally mentioned in Philipp Lenssen's blog.[2]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "Web Archive - Mechanical Turk Welcome page". Archived from the original on 5 November 2005.
2. ^ "CHI, a Collaborative Human Interpreter".

## External links

[edit]

* "Amazon looks to solve problems that stump computers", ZDnet, Nov 10, 2005 [1]