The Mechanical Turk
In 1770, an ambitious Hungarian, Wolfgang von Kempelenchess unveiled his astonishing invention. An elaborate automaton dressed in the garb of an Oriental Sorceror, designed to charm the Empress of Austria in an incredible feat of illusion. The Turk as it's name suggests, was a mechanical Chess Champion which played an accomplished game. Touring Europe & America, it astounded onlookers wherever it performed, soundly beating Chess Champions & some notable Statesmen along the way; President Franklyn & Emperor Bonaparte among them. For over 80 years and in the hands of a variety of owners The Mechanical Turk continued touring the world, intriguing and provoking lively debate wherever it performed. Of course, it was eventually revealed to be a complete fraud. The clever construction hid (a succession of) chess champions in a a secret compartment, each transcribing the automaton's moves from inside the machine. Nobody knows who the original chess player who amazed The Empress of Austria was, but the illusion helped inspire the age of robots to come and left an important legacy in it's name.
Copper engraving of the Original Mechanical Turk image source
HIT - Human Intelligence Task
The term Mechanical Turk is used to describe a system where human intelligence is co-ordinated to perform tasks which computers cannot and that leads to an intriguing & tantalising use case for Blockchain. The Mechanical Turk represents phase one of a crypto project to develop an AI marketplace in the form of a decentralised network which companies and entrepreneurs can participate in, by leasing or renting it's AI services. It is unique in it's decentralised and disruptive approach, leveraging the many benefits of Blockchain technology to achieve a secure and low cost, fee free network running on NEO. What's it called ?
The Effect Network
Phase 1 The Turk
Similar to Amazon's and other online workforce platforms, but with all the benefits of blockchain decentralisation, Phase One is a human workforce on demand. To ensure quality control of work , rated workers establish their reputation based on the quality of their input to earn NEP-5 tokens by completing any number of tasks which can then be used to help teach and refine algorithms. Anyone can perform or request tasks from anywhere in the world and tasks can be completed on any device. Requesters can set the token price of a given task and therefore budget for their own requirements. Workers can choose to complete tasks, based on their preference (and competitive fees) at their own convenience. Smart contracts help streamline the Turk's operation and run on NEO in a similar way to Ethereum, but unlike Ethereum's pedestrian 15 transactions per seconds, NEO's block production rate cruises along at 10,000tps. A future proofed choice.
Phase 2 Smart Market
An open exchange marketplace where developers & enterprise can purchase and sell algorithms as a service. (Sounds like a scene fromBladerunner.) Developers can sell (or rent) their A.I services in exchange for the network token. Each algorithm has it's own wallet and algorithms can communicate with each other, buying or exchanging services from each other. This is the real beginning of the machine economy and The Effect Network is developing the underlying architecture, where automated systems will carry out error free transactions without the need for any human interaction. It's also the beginning of a new chapter of unparalleled efficiency, innovation and parity as artificial intelligence melded with blockchain promise to set us free in a Golden Age of Creativity where machines do all the work and we create masterpieces of the highest art. (Just dreaming here but with purpose.)
Phase 3 Power
A decentralised and distributed computational platform for running deep learning frameworks , the compute engine is based on popular deep learning networks like Tensor Flow. Caffe & MXnet. As a distributed computational network there is a high level of redundancy and no single point of weakness in the system. It's possible to build the system with existing distributed super computer projects like Golem or it can be built on it's own Effect framework. The platform will become a centre of learning for machine projects at much more competitive costs than current centralised offerings. Like SONM and GRIDCOIN, it will leverage networked pc power to offer supercomputing at realistic rates. This is an important step to a brighter future for everyone, including emerging researchers in the field and academics who otherwise would not be able to afford to being self flying cars to the market. That is a feature of Blockchain projects such as this that cannot be underestimated in their potential to change the world from the bottom up, seemingly overnight.. Exciting eh?
How Do I Get Involved ?
If you enjoy organising various types of information or like transcribing and labelling data, you can get involved in teaching AI algorithms by the very fact of your human individuality and ingenuity. If you're a smart tech AI developer, you will be able to use the Turk to train your systems in the most efficient and cost effective way, while entering a marketplace to sell your own services to other interested parties. You will be able to let your algorithms off the leash & conduct their own business. That does sound futuristic doesn't it ! I've tried some online task based services in the past. You can earn fiat money or crypto from working remotely on anything from clerical tasks like stocktaking to legal document summarising or market research for a variety of clients.
Creative Input
AI systems need help learning to distinguish things we find quite easy. We do have very advanced brains to help us, so tasks on the network may need a bit of creative thinking like classifying images (possibly, eventually leading to the holy grail of a visual search engine which can actually find what's in an image, not just a title), Audio transcription, which will help those (currently annoying) automated telephone systems, one day in the not too distant future, actually hold a decent conversation with you. Data labeling will be another task that systems need help with. Data need labels. Humans are good at taking raw data, cleaning it, organising it and feeding it to a computer system. They still find it difficult to sort out, but you can help teach them about context. (Next Stop, H.A.L 9000. Just don't tell him fibs and we'll all be ok)
The Aptly Named Galaxy Pool
To help the network gain traction and growth in it's early stages, a certain amount of liquidity is required in lieu of widespread exchange availability. (Workers need to be able to sell their tokens and* Requesters* need to be able to purchase them). To achieve this, the network will maintain a central pool of token, aptly named The Galaxy Pool. A mix of native & network tokens will be available, governed by a set of rules designed to maintain equilibrium. Smart Move !
The Team
The Effect Team has an interesting mix of proven entrepreneurial and technical skills with high level and academic advisers on it's advisory board. Their digital marketing team have built a comprehensive online presence giving an assurance of quality to potential investors. CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL LINE UP
TOKEN SALE DETAILS
Start Date: March 24th 11am CET
End Date: 18 days after start date
Soft Cap: € 4,280,000
Hard Cap: € 14,820,000
Bonus: 10% For the first 5,200,000 tokens (2% of token sale)
Minimum Contribution: € 50
Maximum Contribution: € 25,000
Accepted Currencies: NEO, GAS
Maximum Supply: 650,000,000 tokens
Token Sale Percentage: 40%
To find out more about the Team and the Project
visit EFFECT.ai or click the links below
Effect.AI Review/Explanation Video
this article is not an endorsement of Effect.ai I recommend all potential investors to conduct their own research and due diligence before making any investments and not rely solely on the advice of others. If you do intend to invest in this project, I recommend you read the whitepaper. Remember investments can go up as well as down.
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