andreas jp

i know all of you have seen one of these tests at one point or another in you online existance. a ‘captcha’ test are those funky letters or numbers that you have to type in when signing up for an account somewhere.

this test was originally invented to make it so that only humans could sign up for, and do do different things on the web, and to stop ‘bots’ from spamming and signing up automatically.  this idea became very popular and is now utilized by almost every internet outlet out there.

the creator of the captcha test later realized that while it did stop bots from doing things, it really did nothing for the human population. so he had an idea.

right now there are multiple organizations who are working to scan and digitize every book in the world. they scan the pages, and computer software recognizes the letters, and ‘types’ it out.  sadly, there are some letter or words in books that the computer is not able to ‘read’ and type out. they originally hired people who would go through and manually type these words in, one at a time, so that the book may be complete. this however took too much time.

so the captcha creator decided to essentially hire the entire world population to help with the project.

this started the TWO-word captcha tests. one of the words is just like any other captcha and matters when signing up for something. the other word is a scan from some book that the computer wasn’t able to digitize.

so when you type in that word, it sends it back to the database of books, and fills in that blank.  the entire world is doing in one day what it would have taken months for the research group to do on their own.

so congrats world, you are helping preserve books for eternity and you didn’t even know it.

(some info here)