CAPTCHAs Used to Restore Old Text
Pretty cool use of tech serving multiple functions at once.
(Image is in the Public Domain)
Not long ago, we learned that CAPTCHAs were being broken by people using pornography to motivate live humans to enter code after code. While very annoying, it was a very clever way of defeating the CAPTCHAs and made spammers day.
Now we see another brilliant use of CAPTCHAs in the restoration of old text too obscured for machines to read
A team of computer scientists has taken a common Internet tool for screening out spam and adapted it to help convert text from old books and manuscripts into electronic files. The effort might not put professional transcribers out of business, but it could cut the cost of creating digital libraries
After a year of operation, reCAPTCHA has helped resolve about 440 million words for client users that are digitizing newspaper and document archives; von Ahn says his team just completed the entire 1908 archive from The New York Times, for example.
This is a very clever use of what would normally be wasted time similar to the idea of distributed computing as in the SETI@home project.
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