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Have you ever tried to sign into a Web site or sign up for an online service and been asked to retype some form of distorted text? Like millions of other Web users, you have just completed a very simple puzzle involving a CAPTCHA (Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).
Such CAPTCHAs are used by Web sites to distinguish humans from automated intruders or bots. On average it takes a person about 10 seconds to decipher the distorted text and plug in the answer to a site. That’s not a lot of time, but it’s estimated people complete about 200 million of these little puzzles every day, consuming more than 150,000 hours of work.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could find some way to put all that brain power to good use?
Well, that is essentially what a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff called ReCAPTCHA Inc. has done. And now that spinoff has been acquired by Google as part of its efforts to spur the digitizing of printed books and other text.
Some bright minds at Carnegie Mellon came up with the following idea: When books or other printed text such as newspaper articles are optically scanned, the optical readers often misread the text. They make mistakes. Instead of reading something like “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party”, it might come out with something like “Mow is the fime forall good mem to come to the ad of the arty.” A human can quickly scan the misread sentence and correct it, but to do this for millions of books and articles would be extremely time consuming and costly.
But – and here’s the brilliant part of the idea – if people are solving millions of puzzles like this every day in the form of CAPTCHAs, why not put those efforts to good use by having them correct digitally scanned text? This is the concept that Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, began working on in 2007 and spun off into a standalone venture in 2008.
Terms of the reCAPTCHA acquisition were not disclosed, but von Ahn has agreed to work for Google at its campus on the Carnegie Mellon campus, while at the same time remaining on the computer science faculty.
“Google is the best fit for reCAPTCHA,” von Ahn said in a statement. “From the very start, people often assumed the project was connected to Google, so it only makes sense that reCAPTCHA Inc. ultimately would find a home within Google.”
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