| 12.07.2008 by Zoltan |  |
Stop spam, read books
Everyone hates proving that they’re human. Captcha’s are those annoying sequences of letters, deformed beyond OCR, in every online form where you have to prove you’re smarter than the computer. But rather than use randomly generated sequences, some clever bod decided it could be put to better use by helping to digitise the world’s library, via a project called ReCAPTCHA
According to the site, “About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent… more than 150,000 hours of work each day.” Put it all together and you get an endless distributed workflow, making good on their promise of “Digitizing Books One Word at a Time”.
A noble cause no doubt and a very simple and powerful idea. Honestly though, if these little puzzles are all that separate us from the machines, we’re fucked anyway, digitised world library or not.
