Amazon Mechanical Turk is a web marketplace that basically lets you buy labor for tasks particularly suited for humans (i.e. easy for man, but hard for computers).
The Sheep Market is a neat, albeit a little whimsical, application of this concept. For a 2006 art project, Aaron Koblin, then of the Department of Design|Media at UCLA, "bought" 10,000 drawings of a sheep facing to the left from thousands of workers for $0.02 each. The work and the animation process are captured and then displayed as an artwork!
Average time spent drawing each sheep: 105 seconds
Average wage: $0.69/hour
Rejected sheep: 662
Collection Period: 40 days
Collection rate: about 11 sheep/hour
Unique IP addresses: 7599
Links: The Sheep Market [Flash] | Description at UCLA's website (with video)| Aaron's website - Thanks wade7!
Comments (1)
As for the rest, it seems like brute force, large numbers of people involved, and having the ego to spend what you stole on extravagant stuff are always a surefire way to screw things up. I prefer smart heisters. :P
FlawlessBook