Carnegie Mellon CAPTCHA Digitization Project Now Underway

tomandlu writes "The BBC is reporting that Carnegie Mellon University has found a novel use for CAPTCHAs — deciphering old texts. We've discussed this project before, but it was prior to it getting off the ground. Users Entering text acts as a sort of distributed computing project. Basically, the CAPTCHA is made up of two words — one of which is known to Carnegie, and one of which isn't. If the user correctly deciphers the known word, then the unknown word is assumed to be correct. Well, almost. Two different users must give the same answer to the same unknown CAPTCHA before it is taken off the list. 'Using the reCAPTCHA system von Ahn's team is digitizing documents and manuscripts as fast as the Internet Archive can supply them, and the good news for book lovers (and bad news for spammers) is that the supply of reCAPTCHAs is not likely to dry up any time soon.'"

Comments

Fiery church?

[gEvil (beta)]

Is this proof that Carnegie Mellon (and the BBC) support religious terrorism?

Re:I want to participate...

[morgan_greywolf]

Apparently, you have to go down to the fiery church to burn a few hours...

Re:Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I right on these points? (I just woke up).

No. Not even close. Get some coffee, then RTFA.

Re:I'm not so sure this is a good idea.

[MrMr]

've already had words like 'Alau' and '45-618' in the few I've done, and since there's an ugly line through them, I can't be close to sure it's right... They make no sense, but they look like that.

Congratulations,
you managed to fail the Turing test.

Re:I'm not so sure this is a good idea.

[Alzheimers]

ELIZA > And how does this make you feel?

Say Foo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Always enter "foo" as the second word, just for the heck of it!