Massive-scale online collaboration | Luis von Ahn
http://www.ted.com After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater...
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How many of you had to fill out a web form where you've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this? How many of you found it really annoying? (Laughter) OK, outstanding. So I invented that. (Laughter) Or I was one of the people who did it. That thing is called a CAPTCHA. And it is there to make sure you, the entity filling out the form, are a human and not a computer program that was written to submit the form millions of times. The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually-impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted characters, whereas programs can't do it as well yet. In the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that...
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How many of you had to fill out a web form where you've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this? How many of you found it really annoying? (Laughter) OK, outstanding. So I invented that. (Laughter) Or I was one of the people who did it. That thing is called a CAPTCHA. And it is there to make sure you, the entity filling out the form, are a human and not a computer program that was written to submit the form millions of times. The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually-impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted characters, whereas programs can't do it as well yet. In the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that...
