The Mechanical Turk

The mechanical Turk was a hoax, the pretense being a machine which could play chess. Instead of a automaton playing chess, the Turk concealed a human chess master. The concept is simple: instead of building a machine to imitate human thought and behavior, use a human. Some have suggested that this might not be economically viable, but spammers have been using the lure of pornography to have anonymous donors decode hidden messages for some time now.

And now Amazon has introduced their Mechanical Turk to do the same.