CAPTCHA. Do you know it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing
Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart?
It’s that
irritating string of letters that you have to enter in order for the website to
know you are a real human instead of a bot.
Here’s what
I read in an article the other day “What most people don't realize is that
their Captcha answers serve two purposes—and here we get to task unification.
In addition to proving to websites that they are not machines, the users of
Captcha are deciphering difficult-to-read words from printed texts. The
system's inventor, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist named Luis von Ahn,
realized that by feeding into Captcha words that computer scanners can't
read—especially the old fonts often found in older publications—users could
help in the massive task of transforming printed content into digital form.
Ordinary web surfers are helping to transcribe the equivalent of nearly 150,000
books a year.
Amazing!
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