Those little puzzle boxes that you have to solve or type in the letters when you complete a secure form on the Internet -- know them? A computer spam spider can't read them; only a human can recognize them because of their presentation and arrangement. Have you seen the ones that seem to have two words that are not always related or seem to make sense? Recently, I have noticed them and thought that this puzzle thing was just getting more complicated to improve security. The puzzle thing actually has a name 'captcha'.
Someone figured out that it takes an average of 10 seconds to do the average Captcha puzzle. Then, they made the rest of the math for how many hours people spent every year solving captcha puzzles and wished for that time to be spent productively for the good of the world.
There is a scanning system used that is supposed to translate letters and words called OCR -- Optical Character Recognition. The OCR software is vastly wanting. Just doesn't work. Sometimes the print is messed up, sometimes the OCR language is just hurting. So, when books or printed items are scanned, OCR appears to make up stuff. ( I can do that, but I'm not this time)
The funky captcha puzzles are letter combinations that are not translating and need the good old human eye to take a look. Then, the most frequently repeated 'translations' through the captcha puzzles are compared and schzam, there is the right word! And before you know it, another book has been digitized properly by utilizing casually spent, if not waste, time. A fun recycle system!
What does this have to do with the price of onions? Probably very little, but it did please me to know it even though it appears many others may have known about it earlier. The topic for me fits the "Damn, I wish I had written or thought of that!"
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