Humans trump computers for a good cause | reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books
Computers it seems cannot do everything, just as yet, especially when it comes to interpreting scanned books or other old texts. So to make up for this discrepancy Luis von Ahn, founder of Captchas (those little word puzzles used to distinguish between humans and spam bots, see above) created ReCaptcha. ReCaptcha takes words from decaying old newspapers and other texts that computers can’t read and lets people identify them, and in doing so proving that they are, in fact, people.
Mr. Ahn calls this “human computation” — using human brainpower to help computers solve problems they can’t solve on their own. The New York Times, for one, has used ReCaptcha to help scan its 150-years-deep archives. And Google has worked with Mr. Ahn before to harness human intelligence, with its Image Labeler, a game in which Internet users compete to add descriptive tags to photographs, which ends up making those photos more identifiable and searchable in Google’s index. (Trendbird)
ReCaptcha is available for both signing up for an online service but for also protecting your email from being identified by spam bots on your website and eliminating the need for such messy methods as gus (at) email . com. A clever little tool, so if you have a blog, website or sign-in page that needs some form of verification of humanness, why not help out a good cause and digitize books at the same time.
Anyone know of any other examples of human computation?
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