I was recently talking with someone about a web project of mine that has, at its core, users tagging meals they ate with the foods contained in those meals. I was mentioning that I spend a great deal of time bringing the friction point of tagging those foods down — making it as easy as possible. They brought up MealSnap, an iOS app that has users take pictures of food, and then magically identifies not only what foods are contained in that picture (magic!) but also the caloric content of that food (doppel-magic!).

I couldn’t stop thinking about how they do it. Do they start with the color of a food, and then do some sort of edge detection? Do they have a massive database of images, and it somehow searches for similar ones? Turns out it’s simpler: they upload the pictures to the web, and then pay actual, real humans to type in what’s inside:

Looks like they’re using Mechanical Turk to identify the foods at anywhere from $0.02-$0.05 per picture and then using the data returned from Mechanical Turk to search for calorie information in their already well established database of food.

With a $2.99 price point for the app, DailyBurn would start losing money at around meal 60. By that point, however, Daily Burn has a loyal user that can easily be converted to the sale of another app in their family of products.

(Thanks, justinxreese). Kind of an ingenious shortcut to the simplest solution to a problem: a human can easily tell what’s chicken and what’s fish. A computer program to do the same might take gazillions of dollars to implement well. It’s easier to pay a modest fee to a well qualified human, e.g. one with eyes and a brain and a reasonable command of English.

This Mechanical Turk business? It’s an Amazon Web Service. Why turk?

The name Mechanical Turk comes from “The Turk,” a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen. It toured Europe beating the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was later revealed that this “machine” was not an automaton at all, but was in fact a chess master hidden in a special compartment controlling its operations. Likewise, the Mechanical Turk web service allows humans to help the machines of today perform tasks they aren’t suited for.

Thx, wikipedia. It turns out when MealSnap says their app is “Magic. Pure magic,” they’re not joking. What is magic but taking something that can’t possibly work, is against the laws of the universe as we know it, and faking it in a believable way for an eager audience?

Well played, MealSnap. I await your next illusion.