Sunday, December 02, 2012

Playing Chess on Amazon Mechanical Turk

So I have this idea - a chess playing "Mechanical Turk" powered by Amazon Mechanical Turk (aka "MTurk")...


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To try to understand the market for chess moves, I manually submitted a HIT to get an initial move from AWS MTurk from the starting chess position.  Reward price was $0.05, and I set a maximum of 10 workers for a period of 24 hours.  Moves were required to be in FIDE chess algebraic notation.  I figured that around the world, hundreds of millions of people know how to play chess, so this was going to attract plenty of workers.

And just 13 seconds after I submitted the HIT, I got my first move back: "e4".  But then a funny thing happened - no one else worked on the HIT.  I guess $0.05 per move might be too low to get much participation.

So here is the board after the White "e4" move by the anonymous worker on MTurk:


r n b q k b n r 
p p p p p p p p 
. . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
. . . . P . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
P P P P . P P P 
R N B Q K B N R 

I fired up gnuchess as the opponent to the MTurk, and it moved Black "Nc6", so here is where the game is at now:


r . b q k b n r 
p p p p p p p p 
. . n . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
. . . . P . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
P P P P . P P P 
R N B Q K B N R

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