Hit display order in Mechanical Turk

Question

Does anyone know whether it exists a specific order according to which the hits are presented to the workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk? Is it possible to control the display order?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I assume you're the one who also asked this on the AWS developer forum.

The answer from Isaac Nichols is:

I'm not sure there is a name for the ordering, but I call it "windowed random". A random HIT is displayed to a worker within a specific subset of the available tasks in the group. For example, if you were to load 100,000 HITs into Mechanical turk, the window might be 500. So a random one of the first 500 available HITs are shown to a worker. The reason for it being random is that you want to minimize the chance that two workers load the same task, otherwise when one goes to accept it, another worker will get an error when they try to accept it. The reason it is "windowed" to a smaller number than all the available HITs is increase the odds that HITs with multiple assignments (used for plurality approval strategies) will be worked on by multiple workers sooner than later. If Turk showed any one of the 100,000 tasks you had loaded and you 2 assignments per HIT, then it would take a very long time before a single HIT to be completed. With a smaller window of available HITs to randomly show to workers, it increases the odds that HITs with multiple assignments will get completed sooner, so the customer will start getting results faster.