The Captcha
Do you love it or hate the Captcha? Unless you have to deal with spammers on a daily basis, you probably hate Captchas. What’s not to love about Captchas?
Most Captchas are difficult to read, take approximately an unwanted extra thirty-two seconds to fill out, and often come back rejected.
The purpose of Captchas is to ensure that Internet users are a real people and not some sort of Spamming Robots. There are some interesting facts about the Captcha and what they are used for that you may not be aware of.
What does Captcha mean? Captcha is an acronym which refers to: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The Turing test was named after Alan Turing who was one of the first to devise tests for gauging a computer’s intelligence (as opposed to a human’s intelligence). In effect, a Captcha is a reverse Turing test as it tests whether or not the user is human.
In India, some spammers will pay humans a small amount per Captcha solved in an attempt to circumvent the Captcha system so that the spammers can seem like real users.
Captchas also have an additional purpose. When we as human Internet users decipher some of the trickier Captchas, we are sometimes actually helping translate old texts into more readable forms of English. The process of digitization or translating printed and/or old texts into more readable forms can largely be done without the help of humans, but the likelihood of error is 30% higher without human input. As the NYT describes it:
“Digitization is normally a three-stage process: create a photographic image of the text, also known as a bitmap; encode the text in a compact, easily handled and searchable form using optical character recognition software, commonly called O.C.R.; and, finally, correct the mistakes.”
Dr. von Ahn, one of the original Captcha creators, later invented a way for Captchas to be used as tools used to assist in deciphering pieces of text; since Dr. von Ahn changed the way Catpchas work, a vast majority of Captchas are now used to translate text into more readable forms with the assistance of the humans using reading and inputting the Captchas.
I don’t know how you feel about the whole Captcha process, but I think the human Captcha users should be compensated in some way for aiding the website in preventing spammers from using the website and for assisting Google in translating printed text into digital content.
What do you think? Should we be getting paid to use Captchas?
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html?_r=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=230834
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