Paper Reading#6 Turkit

Author: Greg Little, Lydia Chilton, Max Goldman, Robert Miller

People work for and are currently at MIT CSAIL and University of Washington

location -UIST’10, October 3–6, 2010, New York

Summary

Hypothesis

By implementing a programming model that allows TurKit possible it will be possible to allow programs to rerun the entire program up to where it crashed in a very cheap manner

Method 

Turkit was implemented in applications such as text recognition, psychophysics experimentation, and iterative writing

Case study results show that this model is good for algorithm style jobs on MTurk. It seems however that performance and usability was some what of a trade off. 

Users had a difficult time discerning parts of TurKit script in the execution trace

Content:

TurKit Script – a language for authoring human computation algorithms 

without re-running costly side-effecting functions.

Crash-and-rerun programming is the backbone of TurKit Script. It is a method for allowing a script to be re-executed.

Turkit allows algorithm tasks to be implemented as straight line imperative programs

Benefits such as incremental programming, print line debugging, easy implementation can be achieved as well

Discussion

I did not have much thought to this whole paper since i don't think it will be widely used anytime soon. This is because i feel that this is all very much still in a very developmental stage of the process. However i think if implemented correctly can save lots of time and increase efficiency in hardware that is used everyday.