reCAPTCHA - Did You Know?

[cjr72]

Here's an article about the guy who invented Captcha and reCaptcha:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/maga...urrentPage=all

But reCaptcha has an even sneakier — and more delightful — purpose. The words are pulled from the book-scanning project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit project in San Francisco that aims to digitize millions of public-domain books and put them online for free. One of the two words in the test is the control word: The gatekeeper computer knows what it should be, so it's there to make sure the puzzle-solver is indeed human. But the other word is there for a different reason. The Archive's scanners are good, but some of the words are too smudgy for the software to decipher. The game takes the image of each smudgy word and puts it into reCaptcha. Each time someone completes a reCaptcha puzzle, they'll be doing a tiny bit of work — translating that difficult image into text, which von Ahn eventually feeds back into the Archive.

It is von Ahn's mania for efficiency taken to its logical extreme. Since people are going to be forced to solve Captchas every day, he figures, why not use that labor? "Every time somebody does one, they basically waste 10 seconds of their life," he says. "By inventing Captchas, I've essentially become this huge time waster. So the question is, can we get you to do work for those 10 seconds?"

[AndiPersti]

If you really want to help fixing OCR errors, check out "Distributed Proofreaders":
http://www.pgdp.net/c/

It's a spin off of "Project Gutenberg" where people proofread scanned public domain texts (amongst others from the "Internet Archive"). You will process one page after another and more experienced users will check the work of beginners.

Since 2000 more than 21,600 books have been uploaded to Project Gutenberg.

Bye, Andreas