Yep - not only is it annoying, it is also a technology being used by scientists to figure out what some ancient manuscripts say. What are CAPTCHAS you ask??
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. In practical terms, a CAPTCHA takes the form of a string of characters subjected to distortions that make it difficult for computerized character recognition to identify them.
That has made the CAPTCHA a useful tool (although the bad guys are catching up) for keeping spam bots from harvesting e-mail addresses or posting spam-filled messages to public forums.
Scientists are apparently currently using reCAPTCHA to determine what chunks of text actually say - using majority people brain power and votes to decipher these manuscripts:
According to the authors, humans handle over 100 million CAPTCHAs every day. “This mental effort is precious,” they write, “since deciphering CAPTCHAs requires people to perform a task that computers cannot.” Their automated system attempts to harvest this precious effort. Scanned text is subjected to analysis by two optical character recognition programs; in cases where the programs disagree, the questionable word is converted into a CAPTCHA. It, along with a control word of known identity (used for cases where a bot is trying to crack the CAPTCHA) are then distributed to participating websites. Currently, over 40,000 sites are using reCAPTCHA.
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