reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books
A CAPTCHA (Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them - colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.
reCAPTCHA Team:
- Luis von Ahn - Executive Producer
- Ben Maurer - Chief Software Architect
- Mike Crawford - plugin development, system administration, documentation
- Ryan Staake - graphic design
- Manuel Blum - helpful ideas, advice, and encouragement
reCAPTCHA Presentations:
- reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books (401 KB)
- reCAPTCHA: (623 KB)
reCAPTCHA News:
- Time Magazine: Computer Literacy Tests: Are You Human?
- Luis von Ahn launches Games with a Purpose. See articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, BBC News, and MSNBC news
- Pittsburgh Post Gazette: Luis von Ahn named one of the nation's top young innovators by Smithsonian magazine. Hanging with a genius: Honored CMU professor loves 'CSI,' misses Guatemalan food
- BBC News: Spam weapon helps preserve books
- Technology Review:
Luis von Ahn named one of this year’s top 35 innovators
under the age of 35. Cmu News Release
- Pittsburgh Tribune Review:
CMU whiz kid on front lines against hackers and spammers
- Pittsburgh Post Gazette:
Latest weapon against spam also enlists computer users to assist the Internet
Archive
- The Wall Street Journal Online: Computer Scientists Pull a Tom Sawyer To Finish Grunt Work
- WIRED Magazine:
For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU
- USA Today: Researchers turn Web blather to books
