We’ve all come across a CAPTCHA, a challenge response test that web sites give viewers who are trying to register for an account, leave a comment, or perform some other task that might be vulnerable to spammers or bots. They are useful because they can differentiate human from machine (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart… don’t ask me how “turing” became a “P” in that acronym).
They look something like this: 
These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks. According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”
What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes? Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.
Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition). If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project. For details on how the technology works, click here.
This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network. reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process. All of us together are smarter than we are added up.
Brilliant work.
(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)
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