oliviatamccue

First a disclaimer that it is not a book review, but an idea review.  It is CLEVER!

Have you heard of “CAPTCHA”?  How about “reCAPTCHA”?

If these new words do not ring a bell, how about “distorted text” which you have to echo to sign-in or register in a web site?

A CAPTCHA is a program to differentiate between a human and a computer.   It shows images with hard-to-read and/or distorted text in some sort of sign-in or registration pages.   One needs to recognize the text and then type the same, for the web sites (computer) to know that a human is in front of the screen.  Computer cannot read distorted text as well as human.  It is a kind of program used by many web sites for security, and to prevent abuse or hacking.

reCAPTCHA is a service to digitize books, newspaper and stuff.  Many articles have distorted text that is not recognizable by the computer.  Human being is better in interpreting ambiguity.  Through the use of CAPTCHA, many people have been helping to solve millions of unrecognized words everyday!

Here is the idea – the distorted text from CAPTCHA typically has two words.  Some part of the text, the computer knows what they are; and some part of the text, computer cannot solve the distorted text.  Guess what; if a user could type the recognized portion correctly, then the computer can collect what a human being thinks of the unrecognized portion.  Since many web sites have CAPTCHA, many people are helping with the recognition of these “unrecognized distorted text”.  The collective user input creates a consistent pattern.   The computer uses the pattern to solve the “distorted text” from books, newspaper or old articles.

If you would like to know more, do a search on “CAPTCHA” or “reCAPTCHA”;  and I wish you the Eureka moments of delight.

Posted in Book Review - English, Chinese, Computer, Literature...