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May 25, 2007, 08:30 AM ET
Saving Books by Solving Puzzles
A security device developed to protect Web sites is now being used to help preserve the texts of thousand of important books, according to a report on ZDnet.
Those stretched and distorted letters on Web page logins--which the user must type the clear-text equivalent of in order to get in--are there to distinguish legitimate users from malevolent programs with hacking on their robotic minds. Computer programs have trouble doing the translation; humans don't.
Luis von Ahn, the computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who invented the technique along with his colleagues, now thinks that as long as people are turning garbled text into clear type, they might as well help solve a much bigger problem. Paper books can be scanned to preserve their text and make it easy to search via computer, but computer scanners can't recognize some of the characters--just as computers can't recognize characters in von Ahn's protection puzzles, called Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).
So he and his colleagues are taking the hard-to-scan book words and turning them into Captchas. When people trying to get onto Web sites solve them, they are solving the book scanners' problems too. Since this "reCaptcha" project launched on Tuesday, 150 Web sites have begun using it. Von Ahn says that through Thursday, the project had digitized 8,000 words from books being preserved by the Internet Archive, an organization building a digital archive of cultural material. --Josh Fischman
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