Rethinking CAPTCHA: The Power of the Human Computer

Each day we humans (yes you) collectively waste more than 550,000 hours decrypting slanted CAPTCHA text in order to prove to our innumerable web services that we are not spam-bots (I still prefer the nostalgic simplicity of: “Are you a robot? Check one: Yes / No / Maybe”). Why? Quite simply, computers are savants — incredibly adept (Wopner!) at particular tasks, while inherently incapable of interpreting non-contextual information in the manner and speed which we take for granted. It takes an average of 10 seconds for a human to “decode” a CAPTCHA gate, but a quick search of Google images will affirm that we’re still light-years ahead of our binary counterparts when it comes to making sense of abstract information, especially visual media. Escalate the challenge to, say, defining the emotion of a human subject in a photograph or the content within a YouTube video and that gap widens further.

But what if all of that uniquely human processing power could be harnessed? What if the powers of each — the human and binary computer — could be tethered to achieve new heights? Enter Louis von Ahn: the inventor of CAPTCHA, who hopes his creation can be the tool in transcribing the world’s decaying wealth of hard-copy information in ways that computers, even with advanced optical character recognition (OCR), simply cannot.

Above in an example of the expanded new system in action (in this case as part of the registration process on Twitter).  Louis von Ahn provides further detail in the video below:

When I first encountered The ESP Game (and it’s Google spin-off), I was amazed at the simple brilliance in its design: utilize ordinary people across the world (read: free labor) to interpret and categorize a vast collection of images within the inviting construct of a casual game (for arbitrary points, no less)… Brilliant. Furthermore, they’ll even recruit their friends to join them, thereby exponentially increasing the power of the collective human machine.

Though CAPTCHA is a necessary annoyance in its current form, the potential of leveraging the simplicity of to derive a social benefit is truly inspired thinking.

[via Search Engine Journal]