Computer Literacy Tests: Are You Human? - TIME

Description

In the meantime, Von Ahn has figured out a way to take advantage of all the spare brainpower hundreds of millions of people expend deciphering wiggly letters. He has teamed up with the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that uses computers to digitally scan books and put the text online, where it can be accessed for free. When its scanners find a word they can't read, they automatically turn it into a CAPTCHA that gets exported to a website in need of one. A human reads it and transcribes it, and the results get sent back to the scanner and added to the archive. It's nice to know we humans are still good for something.

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812084,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812084,00.html