Have you ever tried to scan a document into editable format? It never really works because the human brain uses a HUGE variety of processes for reading. The simple home computer simply cannot do this as efficiently. The solution always leads us to manually proofread the entire document word by word correcting mistake after mistake.

As the print quality gets worse, so does the translation. According to one site, this text:

was translated as this:

‘ letz-1- rrk fit: 1′ . on its to Vc ,rt, cann into tlm yc H_ tcr,la, .n. ‘l l; , arc ti:( h of thc 1″,ats that to ltc rc: ,;. , I; ., l: rel!;n. tani., , ./olio, IJuteilu, . 1!’i./_ ;lr”n. Iiam! Jr.r. F’l,nr_.Z.._%i;;, ,, : rt-Irn: am/ tf.rri.:, t?m steamer as a tr nW r. Uu ,tin;t, c ac?1 1″,at firm/ a t;nn, accor.liu; to .t rn. ‘Cl.w r. wu ru lm:nui MistinW /y in u;th, -. ink ;:,k as to “what w ax 1111, :111(I vle:iR a of ;: (,am( into, mnr r-, tm if tlm wo r( uu.i n:’ of t?u : la?:Iv. ‘c : ol in thc , ucr:atic , , Tlau :; will h:aw tu-li.r . ’1′Im yap?tts Il ,,n an,/ I, ,rr:l. r, (,t tf,is r:ity, start witli it, with lu:rtic: ol 1- e:l.k.

A group of geeks at Carnegie Mellon University got together and discovered that in order to translate billions of virtually illegible words, we need humanpower…. and lots of it!

Have you ever seen these? Two words under the brand ‘ReCaptcha’ (single word anti-spam systems don’t do this)

These two words come from the clever people above to prove you are a human by translating the words…. however there’s something they’re not telling you…

Only one of the words is actually known and tested!

One of the words it knows and proves you are human (as we’ve already established, computers are terrible at reading), the other is completely unknown… when you enter that word, assuming the other was correct, it will be assigned to the image helping the recaptcha machine translate an entire book. YOU have become a slave to the system, one part of the mass humanpower needed to run ‘the machine’

I find this amazingly simple concept is just brilliant… pure genius at it’s best. If everyone puts in a tiny amount of effort, the big picture will form much more quickly than our forefathers could have ever imagined. Proof of the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of our parts.

Now I just need to work out how many of these flipping things I’ve filled out so I can write out an invoice…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 1:57 am and is filed under IT Security Tips, Search Engines, The Internet, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.