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I'm looking for a label to describe the practice of using human-based computation methods or other means of "faking" an algorithm for the sake of getting a product or demo off the ground quickly without spending the time to develop an technical/scalable/analytical solution? Eg: using Amazon Turk to count the number of empty tables in a restaurant.

I'm also looking to learn more about this subject, but not sure what to search for. Human-based computation is only one method, I'm interested in the general idea of pseudo-implementation. Any ideas, recommended reading?

gnat
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Edan
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3 Answers3

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This is called Wizard of Oz prototyping.

Wizard of Oz prototyping is a popular approach in HCI to evaluate new human-computer interfaces. It is typically used if a system is expensive to build but can be easily faked by a human sitting in the other room. Thus the name.

akuhn
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A well-known example of this sort of problem is the Mechanical Turk, where a person hid inside and controlled what otherwise appeared to be a chess-playing machine. Mechanical Turk the most widely-used term for it that I've encountered, even though I think I like akuhn's suggestion of Wizard of Oz prototyping as a more evocative and easier-to-explain name.

Chris Bye
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Seems like this would be related to crowdsourcing; just minus the public aspect. You might want to include that in your keyword search.

Ed Hastings
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