Soylent: A Word Processor With A Crowd Inside | Hacker News Reader

Soylent: A Word Processor With A Crowd Inside

code.google.com

39 pointsMaysonL19 comments

See also Bruce Sterling's take on it (with a video of it in action): http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/09/soylent-a-wor...

The scariest thing about that video is how easily they refer to Soylent as 'it', as in 'it cuts down your text', 'it fixes grammar errors', even though when Soylent is in use it's clearly a 'they'. Or perhaps that distinction is as nonsensical as referring to the bundle of neurons in your head as 'they'...

Remember in the 80s how AI was going to allow computers to do all sorts of things that only humans could do well?

Just a few decades down the line, and now computers can get humans to do all sorts of things that only humans can do well.

Soylent Green is made of People[1]! At the very least it's a clever name.

Really smart, interesting concept. I'm not sure I trust other random people to correct my grammar though.

[1] Thanks to Mr. Kenuda, 11th Grade Physics teacher, who convinced me to watch that movie.

On one level it's quite cool to see human intelligence pipelined as a service, but on another I worry that this may represent a new form of slavery with the turkers being paid at such a low level that other social problems may arise as a consequence.

While I'm sympathetic to this worry about crowdsourcing (which Jonathan Zittrain has been writing and speaking about for years), I'm still optimistic that the architecture of ecosystems like Mechanical Turk can protect people from exploitation. And hopefully the market will set fair compensation per task (although I don't think it has yet).

I pulled out my credit card for an audio transcription API when I took a look at some minor footnote: "powered by people". Felt really disgusted.

This would be really useful for programming, particularly refactoring. Imagine being able to quickly apply a relatively mechanical refactoring that still required human judgement (pretty common), and have other programmers do it for you.

I imagine it would work something like this:

- Select the files/directories/blocks of code that you want the refactoring applied to.

- Describe (in english) what the refactoring work should be, and do an example on one piece of the code.

- The work gets split (by file?) and distributed via a mechanical turk-like interface (extra points if it opens tasks in your favorite editor with syntax highlighting). As workers submit their work, the code is automatically built and tests are run (could be a callback to your local development environment, so you don't have to worry about shipping all your code up to the cloud and figuring out how to build it there).

Could be pretty awesome, particularly if you could enlist an army of freshman CS majors, bored programmers, and eager overseas engineers. I wonder if intellectual property concerns would be too high for people to actually use it though.

EDIT: If I still worked at Google, this would be a fun project to try internally as 20% project. There are lots of mechanical refactoring tasks that need to be done across large portions of the codebase, good build/test infrastructure to easily verify success/failure for a given task, and lots of bored/eager engineers that feed off of reward-based systems:)

Here's my human macro for all you high school/college students:

"Expand these bullet points into a 5 page paper"

Even though it mentions things that are along the lines of correction, this could pretty easily be moved into the realm of crowd-sourced cheating.

I guess you need to be careful not to use this on any confidential documents.

I wonder if shortn could be used to turn regular Wikipedia articles into those fitting of simple Wikipedia[1].

[1] http://simple.wikipedia.org

Mechanical Turk has been the brute-force behind a lot of unique concepts, it seems. Really cool use of crowd-sourcing, and you've gotta love the name. "Soylent is people" indeed.

wow! At 4pm today I was giving a talk in my lab about how cool this work is.

What really impresses though is not that it works. It is the Find-Fix-Verify design pattern which tries to set some good practices in crowd-sourcing. For example in GUI/web engineering MVC is considered good practice.

Refference: Bernstein, M.S., Little, G., Miller, R.C. et al. Soylent: A Word Processor with a Crowd Inside. UIST '10, ACM Press (2010)

Heck, I want this in my hacking. Grep for all the TODO/FIXME and run it through MTURK....

hmmm

Might work better if you write a test for the code.

This would be very useful as a Wordpress plugin.

It would be amusing [and expensive] if it was enabled for comments.

Soylent is made of People!

So will there be a programming language with human powered functions?

In some sense, this is what TurKit already is:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/turkit/

And I think TurKit is part of the back-end for Soylent.

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