Turksort

About

Turksort is a novel sorting algorithm that uses human intelligence to compare the elements of a (possibily) heterogeneous list. It is published in Sigbovik 2020.

You can read more about it in the paper. Read the pdf online here.

Setup

1. Clone this repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/cole-k/turksort.git

2. Install a recent verion of Python 3.
3. Create a Mechanical Turk account and get it set up.
4. Install boto3 and set up your credentials if you didn't already while creating your Mechnical Turk account.
5. Check that the production variable is set to False in turksort.py and the debug variable is set to True, then run

$ python3 turksort.py

This should sort a sample list. The program will output links to the sandbox that you can follow to provide human input.

Acknowledgements

A blog post by Mikey Levine described this algorithm before this repository was created. We (the authors) promise that we came up with the idea independently, but we still wish to give credit to Mikey for writing about it first.

Future plans

• Finish paper writeup
• Create graphs of performance
• Make into a library and clean up the code
• Parallelization