new idea

I had an idea today:

Mechanical Turk is a great way to take a little bit of thinking from a lot of people and apply it to one big project. But what about *really* boring stuff, like recognizing whether a photo is of a mouse or not?

I give you Mousewheel v1.0. It features massive arrays of lab mice, tv screens, and buttons that dispense treats. Three mice are shown an image and trained to respond a certain way to it. For example: if we are searching for mice in photos, they push "yes" if there's a mouse, and "no" if not. The majority gets a food pellet each. Mice with low accuracy are ground up and fed to the other mice in order to serve them better.

The cost of running a single mousenode is far cheaper than a mechanical turker. Watch out Amazon, I'm coming for you!