CAPTCHA for the greater good

Colin A. Bartlett — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:17:00 -0400

We all know those annoying CAPTCHA things where you copy down the letters and digits from the image to prove you’re not a computer.

I like the concept of them and they can be quite handy, although on a large scale they are largely ineffective against determined individuals.

Carnegie Melon University has come up with a way to put all those (they claim over 60 million a day) CAPTCHA translations to good use… scanning books intro electronic format.

reCAPTCHA is a technology that uses words scanned in from books through archive.org. You are presented two words: one the OCR software already knows and one it doesn’t. You translate both to text. If you get the known one correct, it assumes you got the unknown one correct as well.

This is a great idea and a great way to put all those unused “cycles” of human intelligence. We have a few upcoming projects that might need to use CAPTCHA and I hope to use reCAPTCHA as part of the. ~~-Perhaps even create a Rails plugin to use it.~~- (Looks like there already is a Rails plugin… cool!)

has_many :thoughts: Tag captcha

CAPTCHA for the greater good