One thing I detest more than anything else online is when I have to decipher squiggly lines and distorted words to verify that I am indeed a human being.
Yes, captcha not only drives me crazy because I never seem to get it right the first time, but it waste my time.
In fact, the inventor of captcha, Carnegie Melon professor Luis Von Ahn, says during a recent interview on PBS Nova that it wastes around 10 seconds per person . He further estimates this is around 500,000 hours of human time every day. Well, he has found a way to make use of these valuable manhours. reCaptcha!
reCaptcha is an effort to use everyone who enters captcha as a typist in the internet book digitization project. One of the problems of digitizing old books written before 1900 occurs during the scanning process. Many of these old books can't be deciphered by current OCR technology because the fonts used in old books are unrecognizable. Further compounding the problem is language variations and words that are no longer used today. Computers simply don't understand these words.
Von Ahn has combined the human ability to decipher these words with captcha programs in order to digitize old books, and he estimates this massive workforce "unknowingly" involved can translate 125-150 books per day...word by word.
This is an amazing undertaking that has made me have a change of heart about captcha. Yes, I still can never seem to get captcha right the first time, but now I know it's not only fighting merciless spammers, but it's helping to preserve ancient books for future generations and that I'm actually doing something that will benefit humanity centuries from now. Weird enough, but I'm actually looking forward to the next time I get to enter captcha.