I'm not sure how many of you know what \"captcha\" is. I only just recently found out. You all, however, have run across it on the internet at LEAST once. Captcha is that funny deformed letter security thingy you have to type in when registering with sites or posting on a site without actually having to register.
It an acronym for:\"Completely Automated Public Turning test to tell Computers and Humans Apart\". with a nod to the British computer scientist Alan Turning.
The Wall Street Journal carried an article on this on August 13th of this year. If you have a subscription to it, I recommend reading it. I read it in the printed version and I'm NOT going to type out the entire article.
In short, the inventor of this technology (Luis von Ahn)has put a benevolent twist on his old invention originally designed for Yahoo in 2000. The word on some 40,000 sites will now be used to aid in deciphering hard to interpret words from old books and newspapers that are being scanned into digital form. There are some words that can not be interpreted by the software correctly so Mr Ahn has offered this technology to help in that endeavor. Much like folding at home. So now, when you use one of those silly things, it's actually being put to good use (or could be depending on the site).
It's estimated that some 500,000 hours a day are used to type in those codes ... so why not make them more productive?? Oh, this particular project is called \"ReCaptcha\".
For more info goto http://www.recaptcha.com
