Captchas, those inescapable road blocks standing between you and a pair of front row tickets to your favourite band. You know the screen. The one that pops up with one or two distorted words, asking the user to prove that they do indeed have opposable thumbs and aren’t some robot intruder.
I’ve lost many a good seats because of captchas. What a nuisance! When one is as egocentric as most people are when buying tickets, they tend to only think of the nuisance of captchas in the moment and not the bigger picture. But when you think about how many people use the website to buy tickets or how many sites actually use captcha technology, the results are frightening.
It takes 10 seconds to solve a captcha and on average over 200 million captchas are solved a day. This translates to something like 400,000 or 500,000 hours a day wasted on captchas. Imagine what else humanity could accomplish if they put 400,000 hours into something productive?
Luis von Ahn, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and the creator of the captcha, asked himself the same question. Von Ahn, concerned with the amount of time wasted on captchas, a necessary evil in today’s tech-savvy world, decided the time should be used more productively. He created recaptcha, a technology that uses captchas to digitalize books.
Recaptchas essentially take photographs of books unable to be digitalized because of faded print or illegible fonts. The words photographed are used as the distorted words on the captcha screen. The users, you and I, type the words into the computer, digitalizing the books.
This is how recaptcha, is recaptcha-ing books digitally, making the books more accessible to the masses.
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