About  Paper

TurKit is a Java/JavaScript API for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk. You can safely re-execute TurKit programs without re-running costly side effects on Mechanical Turk, like creating new HITs, but still write your program in a straightforward imperative manner—there is no need to unravel the program into a state machine. For a detailed description, please read the paper.

Abstract (from the paper)

Mechanical Turk provides an on-demand source of human computation. This provides a tremendous opportunity to explore algorithms which incorporate human computation as a function call. However, various systems challenges make this difficult in practice, and most uses of Mechanical Turk post large numbers of independent tasks. TurKit is a toolkit for prototyping and exploring truly algorithmic human computation, while maintaining a straight-forward imperative programming style. We present the crash-and rerun programming model that makes TurKit possible, along with a variety of applications for human computation algorithms. We also present a couple case studies of TurKit used for real experiments outside our lab.