The service, known as Amazon Mechanical Turk, is a marketplace where developers can post small manual tasks that are part of larger software processes. Individuals who complete the tasks are paid a small fee.
Mechanical Turk is named for Wolfgang von Kempelen's 1769 chess-playing automaton that beat nearly all challengers thanks to a human chess master hidden deep inside the so-called machine. The service is ostensibly about employing human brainpower to solve large numbers of small problems that computers are ill equipped to address.