14 DAY TRIAL // I can't figure out where these guys come up with all these great ideas! I would have never thought of such an amazing use for the common CAPTCHA. The idea is very simple, yet I, for one, would have never thought of such a thing. Remember that piece of news about Anti-Phishing Phil? It was a game supposed to teach people more about phishing and internet scams. Well, it was designed by the researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The same guys came up with an idea to use CAPTCHA in order to make their life easier.
I've ranted enough, so here are the facts - their team is involved in digitizing old books and manuscripts. Of course, they don't have people retyping books - they use OCR (optical character recognition). However, this system has its flaws and with some books being too old or damaged, it can't properly recognize every word. As BBC informs, the system mistakes one word for another every 10 words or so. So, what can they do? Well, they could get a human being to retype those words correctly but that would be pretty hard and would definitely take a lot of time - that's why these guys thought of something else.
They're turning the words the program can't decipher into CAPTCHA. So, as seen on BBC's site, these guys are going to use two CAPTCHAs, one with an answer they already known and one with the distorted word from the book. So, if the human being gets the word they already know right, then he or she will also get the distorted word from the book right. So that means, whenever people will try to log into some sites or create accounts, they are going to decipher words that the OCR couldn't. This is just a great initiative!