Von Ahn: The professor invented reCaptcha in 2007. Since then, its users have translated 5 billion words. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)From The Christian Science Monitor:
Ten seconds of work has digitized libraries, whether the amateur translators know it or not.
When you buy a concert ticket on Ticketmaster, post something for sale on Craigslist, or poke an old friend on Facebook, you may not know it, but you’re helping to put millions of books online in a vast free library.
To access these websites, you must decipher two squiggly words to prove that you’re not a computer program designed to spam the site. Once it knows you’re human, the website lets you continue.
Those two decoded words don’t disappear, however. In fact, your brain has deciphered words that had baffled the scanning software used for an enormous project to digitize every public domain book in the world.
Read more ....
No comments:
Post a Comment