Sometimes, little Perl modules on CPAN can bring you to nice websites. In this case the website of reCAPTCHA.
The website opens bravely with the tagline STOP SPAM. READ BOOKS. In this day and age of text message (SMS) language where everything has to be as short as possible, reCAPTCHA scores fairly well with their motto. But if you do take the time to look a little further than that, you see the great concept behind the website.
What is a CAPTCHA? reCAPTCHA defines it as:
A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text [...], but current computer programs can't.
The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo.
In the past, I have shown my disagreement with the whole CAPTCHA movement on this blog, for I still believe CAPTCHAs are horribly annoying. But since they are everywhere now, why not use it for a good cause? reCAPTCHA just did that!
reCAPTCHA will show you an image they received out of an OCR process. This word, unidentified by the OCR, is fed to the user and this way, the user is helping to digitize a book. This is in short what they do. Please do read their learn more page and see why this is a really awesome concept!
Comments
BOK wrote at 2007-09-29 23:58: