Exploring Iterative and Parallel Human Computation Processes

Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is an increasingly popular web service for paying people small rewards to do human computation tasks. Current uses of MTurk typically post independent parallel tasks. This research explores an alternative iterative paradigm, in which workers build on each other's work. We run a couple of experiments comparing the efficacy of this paradigm in two different problem domains: image description writing, and brainstorming company names.