On Saturday, January 16, 2016 at 2:12:42 PM UTC-5, Percival P. Cassidy wrote:
On 01/16/2016 01:06 PM, Ken Cito wrote:

1. When they give the two words, why is one easy and the other impossible?
Wouldn't a single impossible work work as well?
What's the reason for the easy word?

2. When they give the house numbers, how do they know you're right?
Are they using us to farm out the job of figuring out the numbers?
What do they "do" with the numbers if that's the case.
Or, does someone already tell them what the number is first?
But, if that's the case, ANY number would work (not just house numbers).

What's going on?

I've read that they're using our responses to refine their Optical
Character Recognition software.

Perce

I believe you are referring to the reCAPTCHA project started by a guy from
Carnegie Mellon University.

https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/partners/s...recaptcha.html

"Beyond its obvious use for foiling bot attacks and would-be spammers, the
reCAPTCHA Project has another, more altruistic purpose. Several years after
introducing the world to CAPTCHA technology, von Ahn realized that, despite
taking just a few seconds to type a CAPTCHA, humans were spending hundreds of
thousands of hours each day typing in more than 100 million CAPTCHAs.

reCAPTCHA technology was developed not merely with an eye toward improving
cyber security, but also as a way to harness and reuse the collective human
time and mental energy spent solving and typing CAPTCHAs--a concept von Ahn has
dubbed "human computation." By constructing CAPTCHAs using words tagged as
unreadable in the digitizing of books and other printed material, millions and
millions of cyber users play a part every day in the digitization and
preservation of human knowledge by transcribing words. Tests have shown that
reCAPTCHA textual images are deciphered and transcribed with 99.1% accuracy, a
rate comparable to the best human professional transcription services. In just
the first year after launching reCAPTCHA, humans correctly deciphered and
transcribed more than 440 million words, roughly the equivalent of 17,600
books."

....and...

"Google says reCAPTCHA's technology can help it with some of its high-profile
initiatives, like scanning books and newspapers to create searchable archives.
As users type in the words, they help teach computers to read scanned text,
improving computer accuracy when converting scanned images into plain text, a
process known as optical character recognition. 'Having the text version of
documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on
mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users,' Google said in a blog
post about the deal. Wall Street Journal, 9-16-09"