Watch the full episode. See more NOVA scienceNOW.
Since you might not be able to watch the video, here's what it's all about:
Luis von Ahn wanted to know what he could do with 100 million people.
When he and his advisor were approached by Yahoo! with a spam problem in email--spammers were acquiring email addresses to send junk into people's inboxes--Von Ahn invented CAPTCHA, which humans can distinguish but computers cannot. (In theory. :P I've had trouble with CAPTCHA several times.)
But it takes time to type those words, and when 200 million people are spending it, it's a lot of seconds. So Luis von Ahn teamed up with a project to put thousands of books onto the Internet, and created something called reCAPTCHA, which places a known CAPTCHA word next to one that the computer does not know--and which comes from one of those books. On average, 120-150 books per day can be typed up thanks to the anti-spam program.
And it's not just books. It's also the entire archive of The New York Times.
So you, in theory, are actually helping to puzzle out hundreds of books when you type CAPTCHA to create accounts, get through computer programs and yes, you got it, comment.
-----The Golden Eagle
0 Yorumlar